Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
by TheFicChick
Summary: "It's the first time I realize that for all of the significance boy-Edward holds in my past, man-Edward is a stranger to me. The thought is at once liberating and heartbreaking, and I don't know what to do with it: how do you forgive someone who no longer exists? How do you hold a man accountable for a boy's carelessness?"
1. Sway

**Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear**

**Summary:** It's the first time I realize that for all of the significance boy-Edward holds in my past, man-Edward is a stranger to me. The thought is at once liberating and heartbreaking, and I don't know what to do with it: how do you forgive someone who no longer exists? How do you hold a man accountable for a boy's carelessness?

**Rating:** M

**Acknowledgement:** I'm so thankful to the wide world of fic for a lot of things, but perhaps chief among them is that it made my path cross with that of HollettLA, who has gone from a kind lady out there in cyberspace who fixes my comma placement to a genuine friend (who still fixes my comma placement). Thanks, lovely, for all of it. xoxo

_**A/N:**__ This story is crafted around the WitFit prompts from February and March 2013. In this story, Edward is very much a high school boy and twentysomething almost-man – he isn't perfect. Bella is very much a high school girl and twentysomething almost-woman – she's not perfect, either. I hope you can like them anyway. Chapters will be short, and a new one will be posted every day, as the story is already complete._

_It's a little different from my normal style, in that I didn't really go back and rework after I wrote; in keeping with the exercise, it is more a stream-of-consciousness, creating-the-story-as-you-go type of deal. Which is to say, sentence fragments galore!_

* * *

_**February 1, 2013 – Word Prompt: Sway. Plot Generator – Phrase Catch: Take it to the limit.**_

. . .

"Would you like to dance?"

I glance up from the glowing screen of my phone, certain that I've hallucinated the dulcet tones of the voice posing that question. When I confirm that I haven't, confirm that it is, in fact, Edward Cullen standing before me, I glance around. Surely I've incorrectly assumed his question is intended for me; certainly I'm sitting beside a Rosalie or a Jessica or some other brighter star in the Forks galaxy. Again, no.

"What?" I say finally, stupidly.

"Would you like to dance?" he repeats, and I might have expected cockiness, arrogance, amusement, but all I see is uncertainty. Wearing slacks and a gray sweater.

"No."

Uncertainty morphs into a sad approximation of surprise. "No?"

I shake my head again. "No." Feel rude, so I add, "But thank you." Feel stupid for feeling rude, so I look back down, losing myself in Twitter. I promised I'd come; I didn't promise I'd participate.

"Why not?"

Another glance up, and the background soundtrack registers. "How does one even dance to Imagine Dragons?"

A frown. "I didn't necessarily mean to this song."

"Hm." More tweets. Rob Delaney is one funny motherfucker.

"Dance with me." Not a request, this time.

"_Dance with me." A younger, bright-eyed Edward, hand held out in expectation; a younger me places her own corsage-adorned hand in his. He leads me to the middle of the gymnasium floor. Silver and black balloons only partly obscure the motivational posters around the cavernous space: "Take it to the limit!" "Push yourself!" "You can do it!" _

"No," I say again in the here-and-now.

"Why not?"

A beleaguered sigh, and I switch off the screen to my phone. "There are two types of women who dance in public." I hold up a finger, not the same one I figuratively held up in Edward Cullen's general direction the last time I saw him. "The first are women who get paid to do so, and in this group I'm including professional ballerinas, strippers, and the Radio City Rockettes." I hold up a second finger. "The second are attention-hungry party sluts who cluster in the middle of a makeshift dance floor in a bar that lets women over eighteen in for free, and they drape themselves all over each other and have the gall to act affronted when random, sleazy dudes step in and grind their junk all over their asses." I drop my fingers and his eyebrows are near his hairline despite the amusement on his lips. I don't need to cast a look beyond him, to where the attention-hungry women of this particular corner of the world are illustrating my point rather perfectly by swaying awkwardly and in varying degrees of drunkenness to the somewhat confusing musical selections of the evidently amateur deejay.

"So that's a no, then."

"That's a hell no."

"You don't dance." Not a question, but I answer anyway.

"I dance. At weddings. Like a normal person."

"That's it? Weddings?"

"Sometimes around my own apartment when I'm getting ready for work in the morning." This admission slips out and I purse my lips against any further confessions. My days of confessing to Edward Cullen, after all, are long gone. Perhaps I underestimated what being in his general vicinity might do to my defenses.

"So what you're saying is that in order to see you dance, I'm going to have to spend the night."

That he opts for levity makes my blood boil. "We're done here." I turn to walk away from him, but he catches my elbow.

"One dance."

I pretend to mishear him. "You had your one chance."

I walk away.

. . .


	2. Dreary

_**February 2, 2013 – Word Prompt: Dreary**_

. . .

When I wake up in my childhood bedroom with a hangover of epic proportions, I'm momentarily confused because I remember leaving the bar last night and driving myself home. Then I remember helping myself to a bottle of Glenfidditch from Charlie's rarely-opened liquor cabinet, and the pair of woodpeckers that have evidently taken up residence at my temples makes more sense. My one-woman booze-fest is even more comprehensible when I recall coming face-to-face with Edward Cullen.

Bastard.

I hear something solid hit the pane of my bedroom window, and my heart flips in my chest. When it happens again, then twice in rapid succession, I glance outside to see gray skies and water-dotted windowpanes. It takes me a minute to realize that the "something solid" wasn't an acorn launched by a teenage boy with a pretty decent pitching arm, but a pebble of sleet. Kicking off the covers, I take a moment to be grateful for the dreary weather. Sunshine would not only make me even more irritable, it would certainly compound my headache. Glancing around, I groan and roll over, smashing my face into the purple pillowcase that I spent countless nights soaking with tears the last time Edward Cullen was in my life.

Fucker.

Another ping against a windowpane, and this time I bury my head beneath the pillow; it drowns out the sound, but the memories burrow beneath it with me.

. . .

_I push my locker door shut and jump when Edward's smiling face comes into view where the open door had been moments earlier. "Hey."_

"_Hi," I reply, hugging the books for my first class to my chest._

"_You know where you're going?"_

_I hitch my backpack higher on my shoulder. "Sort of."_

"_What do you have first?"_

"_Biology."_

"_With Banner?"_

"_Yeah."_

_He nods. "He's decent. I had him last year. Room 203?"_

_I glance at the schedule sandwiched between my binder and my lamentably still-pretty-flat chest. "Yeah."_

_He nods. "I'll walk you."_

"_Don't you have class?"_

"_It's in the same wing. Come on." He pulls me away from the row of lockers by the shoulder of my shirt, and I fall into step beside him. "I looked for you on the bus this morning," he says, nodding hello to a couple of guys leaning against lockers near the end of the hall._

"_Yeah, my dad dropped me on his way to the station."_

_He nods. "Are you busing it home?"_

"_Yeah."_

_Another nod, and we fall into easy silence. I feel surprisingly comforted by his presence at my side; I missed him last year, the hallways and buses of Forks Middle School seeming less friendly without this boy I've known since before I could walk. As if he's read my mind, he grins down at me. "High school suits you already."_

_I roll my eyes. "Thanks, Grandpa."_

_He chuckles. "Here's Banner's room." He draws to a halt. "What's your next class?"_

_I make a face. "Phys Ed."_

"_Just go back the way we came and make a left. Gym's at the end of the hall."_

"_Thanks, Edward." He nods and heads back the way we came. "Hey, where are you going?" _

_He turns but doesn't stop, simply walking backward; the students behind him part like a sea. "My class is upstairs." _

"_I thought you said I was on the way!"_

_He shrugs, grins, and turns. I step into the first class of my high school career feeling the slightest bit taller than I had when I stepped through the front doors of the building a mere ten minutes ago._

_. . ._


	3. Pebble

Thank you so much for all of the reviews and enthusiasm this story has received already. I love this place. And all of you. xo

_A/N:__ Just to clarify, the dates at the top of these chapters are simply the dates of the WitFit prompts; they hold no bearing on the chronology of the story. The italics are for flashbacks, and normal font is for events taking place in the present. (Thanks, goldseadragon!) _

. . .

_**(February 3, 2013 – Reflection Day)**_

_**February 4, 2013 – Word Prompt: Pebble. Dialogue Flex: "I'm not sure my bank account can cover it."**_

My bare toes curl against the hardwood floor, and I curse myself for forgetting how drafty Charlie's house gets in the winter. Of course, the fact that I'm standing in front of the open door doesn't help matters. My skin pebbles into gooseflesh and I cross my arms over my chest, part warmth and part armor.

Edward is standing on my doorstep in jeans and sneakers and a hoodie beneath a quilted vest, looking so much like the boy I loved that it makes me want to punch him. In one hand is a cardboard tray with two cups; in the other, a paper bag with two dots of grease along the bottom of it. "I know this is an insufficient peace offering, but I hope you'll let it be a start."

When I don't invite him in, he holds the bag and the tray out to me. When I make no move to take either, everything falls: his hands, his shoulders, his eyes. I cling tightly to my anger with both hands so that I don't have a free one with which to reach for him. That his obvious sadness can still infiltrate my heart makes me angry all over again. "What can I do to make it up to you?" he asks finally, all earnestness and hope.

My armor doesn't dent. "I've always wanted a pony."

A small smile, and I curse my immediate response; I don't want him thinking I'm still the Bella who banters. At least, not the Bella who banters with him. "I'm not sure my bank account can cover it," he says, and once again his attempt at flippancy only irritates me further.

"Well, your balance is zero with me. In the red, even." I slam the door on him and his breakfast peace offering and his easy smiles. It doesn't feel as vindicating as I had hoped it would. He leaves one cup and the bag on the welcome mat. When I'm sure he's gone, I reach out and snag them both. When I take a sip of the coffee that turns out to be hot chocolate, the unexpected sweetness makes my throat burn.

. . .

"_Where's the Swiss Miss?"_

"_That's not hot chocolate," Edward scoffs, nose wrinkled as if I've suggested he drink swamp swill. He retrieves a canister of Ghirardelli powder from the cabinet beside the fridge and bends to pull a small saucepan from the cupboard next to the oven._

"_Rich-people hot chocolate," I say, only half-kidding._

_Eye-roll. "Good hot chocolate," he amends. "Grab the milk for me." I do so and he pours it into the pan, turning on the burner and letting it heat for a few moments before scooping two spoonfuls of the powder into it. I watch as he gently stirs it with a small whisk, mildly embarrassed by my inability to look away from the subtle shift of muscles beneath the skin of his forearm. I don't know why I'm suddenly noticing all of these foreign things about this familiar boy, noticing that he is less boy than man these days, and I'm grateful that his back is turned._

_When the mugs of cocoa are ready and he's squirted a generous dollop of whipped cream on the surface of each, I grab the mug nearest to me._

"_Nope," he says quickly. "That one's mine." Confused, I hand him the mug and he holds out the other one to me. Glancing at the message printed on the side, my fifteen-year-old heart skips. _Someone in Forks, WA loves me.

. . .


	4. Café

_**February 5, 2013 – Word Prompt: Café. Plot Generator – Idea Completion: Snowed in.**_

. . .

The sleet has morphed into real snow, dusting the street and the yard in a thin carpet of white. It's the kind of snow that, if it keeps falling, will smother the landscape in a featherlight layer. The type I loved as a kid, because it was perfect for snow angels but not soggy enough to make decent snowballs, which meant I could flap my arms and legs in relative peace and not worry about being pegged in the face by Edward. The type of snow that will make everything – at least, everything outside – peacefully silent.

For late autumn, the Forks weather is unusually frigid. Idly, I find myself wondering if the unexpected cold snap – and apparent snowfall – will derail any of the plans for the Cullens' party. I feel faintly guilty at the cowardly, spiteful part of me that hopes so before pushing thoughts of the Cullens away altogether.

Flipping the switch on the nearly antique coffee machine, I lean against the thin strip of counter where it meets the sink, gazing out the window as I contemplate buying Charlie a single-serve brewer for Christmas. Think better of it, because experience tells me it'd gather dust in its box until it was too late to even exchange it for a top-tier fishing rod. As I watch the snow fall like a curtain of confetti, I'm transported back to snow days with no school and a different type of blanket entirely.

. . .

"_I'll pick you up after my shift, okay?" Charlie is standing inside Esme and Carlisle's front door, snowflakes sitting on the shoulders of his leather police bomber like dandruff._

"_It's no problem, Charlie," Esme assures him with the easy smile her son inherited. "I'm glad to have her. Goodness knows she'll probably keep Edward from driving me crazy today."_

_A gruff nod and my father leaves me with Esme, who says Edward is still asleep and gestures toward the kitchen. "Hot chocolate?" I nod as I follow her, watching as she makes the cocoa just the way Edward made it for me, stirring the milk in the small saucepan with a whisk, then topping each mug with a healthy dollop of whipped cream from a can before presenting one to me with a flourish. "_Et voilá_," she says. "Welcome to Café Cullen." I giggle as she takes the seat across from me. "So, hon. How are things? How's school? Any cute boys in your class?"_

_I flush. "No," I tell her honestly. Edward isn't in my grade, after all; he's a junior, and the sophomore boys are a bunch of trolls._

_She smiles, sipping from her own mug. "I remember," she says, licking cream from her upper lip. "There's always a period where the girls are all beautiful young women and the boys are all…well. Boys." _

_My mind flashes again to her youngest son, and I want to tell her that I don't remember Edward ever having a troll phase, but for the first time I'm all too aware of the fact that she's Edward's mother and not mine, no matter how badly I wish I had a mom like Esme Cullen._

"_Hot chocolate?" I whip around to see the boy of my speculative silence standing in the doorway, plaid pajama pants only slightly less wrinkled than his white t-shirt. "Why didn't you wake me?"_

_Esme rolls her eyes. "Go upstairs and get showered and dressed, and it'll be waiting for you when you get back down here." He glances at me and gives me a sleepy smile._

"_Hey."_

_I smile, and suddenly he steps forward, reaching toward my face. I'm paralyzed by my own confusion, and his thumb swipes against the tip of my nose, coming away with a smear of whipped cream. I blush and he grins, sticking his thumb in his mouth and turning on a heel to head back upstairs._

_When I face his mother again, she's watching me intently. It's the first time I realize that the mischievous smirk that regularly graces Edward's face is an expression he apparently gets his from his mother._

_An hour later, the snow has blanketed everything – Charlie is stuck at the station, Jasper is stuck at a friend's house, Carlisle is stuck at the hospital, and I'm stuck with Edward while Esme makes dinner. Well, "stuck" isn't entirely accurate. We've apparently reverted to our eight-year-old selves, and are goofing off with flashlights in the blanket fort Edward made between the couch and the cherry wood entertainment unit._

"_That looks like a penis," he tells me, and I'm grateful that the instant flame in my cheeks is probably invisible in the semidarkness of our cocoon. _

"_It's a rabbit," I say, elbowing him._

"_A penis-shaped rabbit, maybe."_

_I elbow him again; this time, he catches my arm and rolls me, sending my flashlight clattering away. Before I realize his intent, he has me pinned beneath him, his mouth pressed gently to mine. He kisses me for a few seconds, closed mouth pressed to closed mouth, and when he pulls back to look at me, I can just make out his glittering eyes in the dim light of our blanket bubble. _

_I lick my lips, wondering idly if the lingering taste of chocolate is from him or me. "Why did you do that?"_

_There's a smile on his face I've never seen before. "Because I've wanted to for ages."_

. . .


	5. Plate, Grate, Slate

_**A/N:**__ I feel the need to clarify something because it was mentioned by a couple of reviewers: in chapter one, Bella voiced her disapproval of women who dance "provocatively." This is not, in any way, a slut-shaming thing. This is about how this Bella feels about these particular characters, which will be explained in greater depth in later chapters. Thanks for asking! xo_

* * *

_**February 6, 2013 – Word Prompts: Plate, Grate, Slate**_

. . .

For the tenth time, I curse my absentminded packing, which has left me stranded in my father's house without my Kindle or even a trusty paperback with which to distract myself. I never bother bringing my laptop, since Charlie doesn't have WiFi, and his three basic cable channels are showing a rerun of _Murder, She Wrote_, a cooking show, and a documentary about paleontology that I gave the old college try before realizing about six minutes in that I'd rather subject myself to a root canal than sit through. I scan Charlie's living room "bookshelf," finding fishing magazines, baseball almanacs, and more than a few true crime paperbacks I've bought him over the years. There are also two copies of _Stories About Summer_: one in hardcover and one in paperback.

I slide the hardcover out carefully and crack it open, flipping a few pages until my eyes find the handwritten dedication that I'd penned beneath the printed one also bearing my father's name.

_To my father, Charlie, who taught me to speak and to write, and who helped me find the voice with which to do both._

Beneath it, simpler words in my own looping hand.

_I love you, Dad. _

_Love always, Bella._

I slide the book back in beside its paperback twin, smiling when I remember the first time I'd noticed them sitting there side by side in his living room, the only fiction books I've ever known him to own. When I inquired as to why he needed two: "I wanted to walk into a bookstore and buy my kid's book." An embarrassed flush, a gruff shrug – Charlie in a nutshell. I miss him suddenly, painfully, and immediately feel silly for doing so considering he'll be home in time to attend the shindig that looms overhead.

On the off-chance that there's still a well-thumbed favorite left behind, I return to my bedroom. A quick perusal of my own shelf shows only the required reading from my high school English classes and a few books I hadn't enjoyed enough to want to take with me when I left. Glancing upward, I spy a few board games atop the shelf, one in particular launching me back in time with all the subtlety of a catapult.

. . .

_Another snow day, another blanket fort. A bit more kissing this time, then, at Esme's barely-disguised implication of a warning, a board game. I look down at my tray of letters – E, T, A, E, S, P, G – and then scan the board; if I can find an unused L or R, I can make something out of nothing. Grate, plate, slate._

"_This is pretty masochistic of me," he says as my eyes traverse the board._

"_What?"_

"_Playing Scrabble with a writer. Really, it'd be like you trying to take me in darts."_

"_I could take you in darts," I argue, more because that's what I do than because I believe I could ever best him at anything remotely athletic, particularly anything involving throwing._

_Edward snorts. "Yeah, right."_

"_I've got a good arm."_

"_No, you don't, but you've got good other parts."_

_Another glance at my tray, and it's too bad we can't just spell something with the letters we have. T-E-A-S-E. "Well, I'm hardly a writer yet." Deflection. Also what I do, particularly when these new things between us become too unfamiliar. Too overwhelming._

"_Being a writer isn't like being a doctor," he argues as he drums impatient fingers on his denim-clad thigh. "You don't need some fancy degree or a license to make you one. You write beautiful words, Bella; you're already a writer. You just have to figure out what you want to write and write it."_

_I keep my eyes trained on the board, even as I'm momentarily unable to make any sense of it. "Thanks," I say finally._

_After another moment of silence, I see Edward's fingers toying with his own tray. Finally, he speaks. "Promise me that when you do write something, I'll be in it somehow."_

_When I glance up at him briefly before considering the board again, his eyes are downcast. I return my focus to the puzzle of words before I reply. "Promise me that you'll still be around, so you can be on the dedication page."_

_He meets my eye, the smile I love stretching the lips I love. "You got it."_

_Back to the board and I find an E; glancing down at my tray, I beam when I spot what I hadn't seen before. I lay down the letters._

_E-L-A-T-E._

_. . ._


	6. Prize

Thank you, once again, for the reviews. You're all lovely. xo

* * *

_**February 7, 2013 – Word Prompt: Prize. Audio-visual Challenge – Musical Mastery: "Hall of Fame" by the Script feat. will. .**_

. . .

I get through the first two pages of my own book before I feel ridiculous and pretentious and oddly exposed, considering I'm reading it in an empty living room. Returning the paperback to its home on Charlie's shelf, I glance around the space once again before I hear the muted sound of my phone ringing from inside my purse. Seeing Alice's number, I flip it open.

"Hey," she says before I can even answer. "I have two hours to kill before I have to go with Esme to the florist, so I'm picking you up and we're going for coffee."

"I'm actually just about to run to the grocery store, Al."

"Bella, you want to meet me for coffee." Something in her tone puts me on edge, sends me back about six years to the last time she had something important to tell me.

"Of course I do," I say as diplomatically as possible. "But Charlie's cupboards rival Old Mother Hubbard's."

"I thought you were a novelist, not a poet." Her words are light, but the thread of gravity isn't entirely gone.

"Rain check?"

I hear her sigh, and I know the volume was on purpose. "Bella, I'd like to hang out before the party."

"The party's in two days."

"My point exactly. You know how the Cullens get with their events; God knows what tomorrow's going to look like."

I laugh, even as her familiarity with "the Cullens" makes something twist in my chest. Once upon a time, she didn't care for them, resented my friendship with Edward and, later, my love for him that too often encroached on the amount of time Alice and I had to spend together. That she wound up falling in love with Jasper while they were attending the same college is something that I would have found funny if it didn't hurt for some reason I've never cared to explore. That she's evidently the surrogate daughter running florist-type errands with Esme makes me the resentful one.

. . .

_I see my entry pinned to the board with a collage of other entries: other short stories, photographs, poems, artwork in an array of colorful media. Adhered to the corner of my white page of typed words is a blue ribbon._

"_Oh, my God." I'm stunned._

"_I told you!" Edward is gleeful._

"_Oh, my God." _

"_I'm so proud."_

"_Oh, my God."_

"_Okay, you just won an award for creative writing. Think you can use that considerable vocabulary to find some new words?"_

"_Oh, my God."_

"_Bella." Edward's hands are gentle around my biceps. "Bella, congratulations." I look up into his familiar green eyes._

"_Oh, my God." A whisper, this time, and his smile softens. _

"_You're going to be bigger than Hemingway. Bigger than Dickens. The whole world is going to know your name, and I'll be able to say I knew you when you couldn't even spell 'write.'" _

"_To be fair, I was six, and your status as a second-grader gave you an undeniable advantage when it came to Hangman."_

_He concedes the point with a shrug before glancing at the small crowd of people standing between us and the board, inspecting the entries. "How rude would it be of me to shove through all of these people and snatch it off the wall?"_

"_You can't. It stays here in the gallery as part of the exhibit until the end of February."_

"_I'll put it back."_

"_Then why do you want to take it down?"_

_He gives me an odd look. "I want to read it." Immediately, I feel raw and exposed. Writing those words was one thing when they were being sent to a scholarship contest board of judges who were all strangers. To have the subject of the piece reading it in my presence makes me feel as if I'm at the pinnacle of the first hill on a roller coaster in that one moment of weightlessness before the downward plunge._

"_I, um…" I shake my head, glancing at the blue ribbon. I know he's going to read it, going to get this free pass to look right inside my heart, but I don't know if I can handle it happening right now, in this moment, when I'm already stunned and off-kilter. "Can you read it later?" I stare at the ribbon again. I've never won anything before, and to win something because I wrote about Edward seems strangely fitting, as if I had the prize before I ever entered the contest._

"_Yeah." He gives me a small smirk. "Why, is it about me?" His teasing tone tells me that he expects a negative answer; my actual answer makes his eyebrows jump._

"_Edward, even when it's not about you, you're still in everything I write."_

_It's the first time he kisses me in front of our parents._

. . .


	7. Swap

_**February 8, 2013 – Word Prompt: Swap. Dialogue Flex: "You'll have to wait and see."**_

. . .

Another check of my list reveals that I left the produce section without grabbing an onion for the spaghetti sauce; I turn and crash into a wall. Stepping back, I realize the wall is actually Emmett Cullen, whose career as a college athlete evidently upgraded his physique from pickup to Mack truck.

"Swan!" he says brightly. "Long time, no see!" He pulls me into a hug and I let him squeeze me slightly tighter than is generally comfortable, my handheld grocery basket bumping against his hip before I place my free hand flat on his expansive chest and push gently.

"Hey, Em."

"I hear congratulations are in order," he says, dimples deep as ever.

I frown. "What?"

"Big-time author now, huh?"

"Oh. That. Yeah, well." I still haven't figured out how to be gracious when people acknowledge that I achieved the lone goal I had as a high school student.

"I hope the book's better than that," he teases, and I roll my eyes, relaxing into the familiarity of banter.

"Depends on who you ask."

"Edward says it was brilliant."

It's the first confirmation I have that he's read my words, and what that particular revelation does to me is far too complex to dissect in the dairy aisle of the grocery store, let alone in the presence of one of his family members.

"It was," I hear from behind me, and I turn to see Edward holding a bag of lettuce. "Hey," he says, dumping the romaine into the basket Emmett's pushing before burying his hands into his pockets.

"Hey," I reply.

"Oh," Emmett says. "We need, uh, lemons. I'll run back and get some. Bella, see you at the party." He vanishes before I can say goodbye, and Edward takes a step closer to me.

"Your book…it really was beautiful," he says, and I never knew that such kind, gentle words could cut so sharply.

"Don't."

"I'm sorry," he says reflexively. His eyes are sad, and I know without explanation that the apology's not for the comment. "Bella, I really am sorry."

The metal handles of my basket dig into my palms. "I wish that made things different."

"Me too." When I say nothing else, he shifts his weight. "Do you think…are you ever going to forgive me?"

"I don't know." I shrug. "Guess you'll have to wait and see."

The Edward I knew, grew up with, loved would have fought this, demanded a more immediate resolution. The Edward standing before me simply nods. "Okay. I'll wait."

It's the first time I realize that for all of the significance boy-Edward holds in my past, man-Edward is a stranger to me. The thought is at once liberating and heartbreaking, and I don't know what to do with it: how do you forgive someone who no longer exists? How do you hold a man accountable for a boy's carelessness?

"I think it's important to tell you…" He pauses, and I can see the outline of his hands clenching into bulging fists inside the denim pockets of his jeans. "I'm not going to try to win you back or anything. I don't want you to think…that. I don't want to make you uncomfortable. I just want you not to hate me. It kills me, knowing you're out there in the world somewhere hating me."

"I don't hate you. Honestly, Edward, I hardly ever even think about you." Look at that: six years and a few hundred miles have turned me into a liar. A pretty good one, if the hurt that flashes across his face is anything to go by. My own pang hits me in the chest, and I shove it away. I refuse to feel guilty for lashing out, all things considered.

By the time I'm back in Charlie's kitchen unpacking the groceries, I realize I still don't have an onion.

. . .

"_Holy shit!" I tear my mouth from Edward's, pressing the back of my hand to my lips and cutting my eyes to the doorway, where Emmett stands with one hand on the doorknob, his mouth hanging open. "You're swapping spit with Swan!"_

"_Get bent, Emmett," Edward says, running a hand through his disheveled hair. "What are you even doing here?"_

"_I can't come home from college for some home cooking and to see my baby brother?" Smirk. "Who, from the looks of things, is well on his way to becoming a man."_

_If my cheeks weren't already flushed from Edward's kisses, Emmett's implication would do it. "Fuck off, Em," Edward says, ghosting a gentle thumb over my fiery cheek. "Leave my girlfriend and me in peace." Emmett's laughter follows him down the hallway as he drags his duffel bag behind him. "Sorry," Edward says softly, his eyes sheepish. "I didn't realize he was coming home."_

"_It's okay." I play with the hem of his shirt. "Do you think he'll tell your parents I was in your room?"_

_He shakes his head. "No, considering I never told them that I walked in on him having sex with his girlfriend in their bed while they were away for the weekend and he was supposed to be in charge of Jasper and me."_

"_What?" I feel scandalized. "When was that?"_

_He shrugs. "Spring break his senior year." I don't know if his nonchalance is because it happened so long ago or because the idea of his brother having sex – even in his parents' bed – doesn't shock him. I realize once more that Edward's social circle involves a lot more sex than mine ever has, and it only serves to make me more aware of the one-year age difference that some days seems more significant than it ever has before. "Can I kiss you some more?" he asks, his hands rubbing slow circles on the small of my back._

"_Of course you can."_

. . .

**Thanks for reading. xo **

**Have you ever had to forgive a person for something s/he did a lifetime ago?**

**Come find me on Twitter (aka, where the inanity happens): TheFicChick**


	8. Mantel

_A/N: I've loved hearing everyone's thoughts on forgiveness; thank you for sharing them with me. I think it's one of the harder things in life; as much as we'd sometimes like to erase the bad things that have happened to us, they shape us. For better, for worse, but almost always for good._

. . .

_**February 9, 2013 – Word prompt: Mantel**_

. . .

It's funny how sometimes the absence of a thing can be nearly as conspicuous as its presence. In this particular case, it's the presence of the silver photo frame on Charlie's mantel and the absence of the photo that I remember it holding when he first bought it. I always hated the photo itself, simply because there's never actually been a photo of me that I really liked, but I secretly loved the photo for what it meant. It was the portrait-style picture that I ordered from the Homecoming dance Edward's senior year: a dapper boy in a dark tuxedo with his arms around the waist of a dark-haired girl in a glittering dress that looked like the ocean at night, the white rose on his lapel a perfect match to the one around her wrist. It was the first time I saw myself in his arms from the other side of the lens, and it was the first time I realized that, to the outside world, it actually looked like what it felt like on the inside: that I belonged to him.

As I note the photo that's in the frame now – a shot of me at my first book signing – and wonder idly what happened to the other one, I remember for the first time in years the anxiety I felt during that time in my life. The insecurity that grew from the knowledge that he'd be leaving me, starting a new life at college while I was stuck in Forks for another year. It never occurred to me back then to consider the possibility that I might lose him before he ever left.

. . .

_His tuxedo jacket is draped over the back of my desk chair, white rose slightly wilted and hanging heavily from the lapel. My strappy heels are beside my bedroom door, his shiny dark shoes next to them, and his socked feet rub gently against my bare ones on top of my floral bedspread. His shirt collar is undone, and I don't know if the goose bumps on my skin are from the slight chill in the air or from the familiar yet exhilarating feel of his lips moving against mine. _

_His kisses taste sweet, a combination of him and the gum he was chewing in the car, and the steady stroking of his tongue against mine is making me giddy. My skin is alive with sensation, as if there is a fire burning beneath the surface, flames leaping up to meet the gentle brush of his fingertips against my cheek, my jaw, my neck. Suddenly his mouth is gone from mine, and I'm breathless as my eyes pop open to stare unseeingly at the ceiling. Then I feel his tongue and teeth pulling at my earlobe and my eyes fall closed again as I gasp, a new and foreign thrill rocketing through me._

"_Edward," I pant._

"_Bella," he moans, his mouth finding the skin of my neck as his hand moves to the back of my dress, dragging my zipper down slowly. Involuntarily I tense, and he pulls back to gaze down into my face. "It's okay," he murmurs, equally breathless. "I just want to touch your skin. I won't go anywhere."_

"_Okay," I say, and he gives me a soft smile before lowering his mouth to mine again, his palm tracing that same fire along the flesh of my bared back. I can't concentrate, my focus flying from the taste of his tongue and the press of his lips to the gentle rubbing of his thumb against my spine. I'm trembling and wanting and terrified by the sheer intensity of the foreign fire racing through my body. When I reach the point where I fear I will be engulfed, I pull away, gasping for breath. Edward's heaving breaths match mine, and I curl into his side as we come down together, my head on his chest. I revel in the reassuring intertwining of his fingers with mine, the gradually slowing thud of his heart beneath my ear._

. . .

**Thanks for reading.  
****Please bear in mind that, as ****mentioned in chapter 1, this story is crafted around WitFit prompts. The thing about these prompts is that, as the writer, you don't know what the next day's will be, so you're writing blind. This is, in part, responsible for the pacing of this story. (I say "in part," because a gradual and steady build-up is sort of my style, anyway.) xo**


	9. Shield

(_**February 10, 2013 – Reflection day)**_

_**February 11, 2013 – Word prompt: Shield. Plot Generator – Binding Blurb: In 500 words or fewer, write a blurb or short entry about "love at first sight."**_

. . .

I can't quite believe he still has it. I haven't read it since the day I yanked it from the refrigerator and tore it in half four times, into sixteen near-perfect squares that did nothing to indicate the riotous haze of staggering fury and heartbreak I was in when I did it. To find it painstakingly taped together and inside another frame, with its accompanying blue ribbon pressed beneath the glass, is as surprising as it is confusing. It's as if Charlie was trying to shield the innocence of young Bella from the jaded and bitter hands of older Bella – as if he's trying to preserve what's left of my more pure heart. The first two words alone are enough to make my breath catch in my throat.

. . .

_First love. It's such a beautiful, fragile thing, the first time you give your heart away. It makes you a certain kind of vulnerable, like a foal taking its first steps on shaky toothpick legs. I suppose the key to a first love that sets you on the right path is choosing the person who will help you navigate those early steps, guiding you patiently and gently until you have the confidence necessary to walk on your own stronger legs. And I expect that's what mature love is: being able to walk side by side without having to hold on to each other. Knowing that, without restraining the person you love, he will choose to walk alongside you at the same pace you keep. Knowing that, if one of you needs to slow down, to pause for a moment, the other will wait right there beside you, and perhaps even point out a nearby bloom or a floating butterfly while you catch your breath._

_So many people laud the excitement, the thrill, of love at first sight. The concept of knowing with the immediacy of a lightning bolt that you want another person. I don't know anything about that – after all, I'm only sixteen. What I do know is the comparable if not superior value of love at second glance: when someone you have known your whole life suddenly steps into a brighter spotlight. When a person you assumed you knew inside and out opens a door within himself that you'd never noticed, like a small closet beneath the stairs that you walk by without realizing it, and suddenly there are all sorts of new things to discover that you never knew he carried inside him. I think it's a beautiful thing when your first love is with someone who knew you before it even occurred to you to put your best foot forward. When it's a boy who's seen you mad because you lost, crying because you fell, laughing because you managed to blow all of the dandelion fluff off in just one breath. A boy who has bought you Cabbage Patch dolls, puzzles, CDs, and flowers for various birthdays over the years. A boy who throws acorns at your bedroom window when your mother leaves your father for good and somehow forgets to take you with her; a boy who sticks up for you when the prettier, richer, more popular girls at school tease you because your single father has no idea that the unfashionable jeans you're wearing make you a target for ridicule._

_It's a beautiful thing, knowing that someone loves you when he knows everything there is to know about you. It makes your heart feel safe in his gentle hands. _

_People can keep their "love at first sight" dreams; I'll take my love at second glance any and every day._

. . .

**Thanks, as always, for reading.**

**A/N: Three of my favorite quotes about forgiveness:**

1. "Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it." (Mark Twain)

2. "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned." (Buddha)

3. "I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night." (Khaled Hosseini, _The Kite Runner)_


	10. Fever

_**February 12, 2013 – Word Prompt: Fever. Dialogue Flex: "You can't please everyone."**_

. . .

"What are you doing here?" I blame my surprise for the fact that the first words out of my mouth aren't exactly polite ones.

Charlie glances around his foyer in mock confusion before focusing on me. "Last time I checked, this was my house. Unless you've moved in and kicked your old man out in the past two days."

I shake my head, rising from his sofa and wrapping my arms around his neck. He stiffens slightly, then relaxes into the hug. We've never really been huggers, but the past couple of days in his house with nothing but my old ghosts for company make me grateful beyond measure for his unexpectedly early return. "Sorry," I say, pulling away. "I was just surprised. I didn't think you were coming home until tomorrow."

He shrugs, dumping his duffel bag inside the door and kicking off his boots. "Told Billy you were in town and he said he didn't mind if we cut the trip short." I want to tell him he didn't have to do that, but I'm so glad he did that I'm not sure the words would ring true. "You hardly ever come home, so I didn't want to spend your whole visit freezing my ass off."

"Catch anything?"

"Nothing big enough to make it worth it," he replies, shrugging out of his coat. "Lemme grab a shower and we'll catch up." I nod and step aside as Charlie climbs the stairs, and I go back to my perch on his sofa and my mug of coffee. Fifteen minutes later, he's standing in the kitchen with me, smelling of Irish Spring and Old Spice and everything familiar and comforting and _home_.

"Your coffeemaker sucks," I tell him as I pour him a mug.

"You can't please everyone," he replies. "Maybe if you agree to come home more than once a year, I'll invest in something more suitably high-brow."

I roll my eyes as we return to the living room and he sinks into his recliner with a relieved sigh, steaming mug in his hand and thick cabin socks on his feet. I can tell by looking at him that he's wearing more than the usual number of layers.

"Cold out there?"

"Freezing. After the borderline pneumonia Billy got last year, I can't believe he still wanted to go." I remember Charlie's panicked phone calls, updates on his best friend's steadily climbing fever, my status as the only woman either of them was willing to call at two in the morning despite the fact that I knew little more than they did about home remedies. Charlie shakes his head. "I like fishing as much as the next guy, but if he didn't get such a kick out of the ice fishing thing, I'd be content to leave it until spring."

"You're a good friend," I say, raising my mug to my lips.

"So. Tell your old man what's been going on in your life."

I shrug, picking at a loose thread along the edge of his couch cushion. "Not much. Working. Writing some."

Charlie nods. "Another book?"

I shrug. "I don't know. I don't know what it's going to be yet." I don't tell him the truth: that this second round of words is made up of ones that I'm not sure I could ever share with anyone else. That the minute I got the invitation in the mail with the Forks return address, I started putting figurative pen to paper in an attempt to purge some of my old demons. That I reopened old scars that some nights make me so raw I spend hours twisting and turning, tying my bed sheets in knots as I try unsuccessfully to find the blissful peace of sleep.

That while I thought I had spent all of the years between then and now growing, healing, maturing, moving on, it turns out that I'd simply numbed that part of myself, and that with my return, sensation is returning by degrees: tingles, a small burn, a dull ache.

I don't tell him that I'm terrified of what the next level of sensation might be.

. . .

"_This is about me?" Edward asks, his eyes darting between my scarlet face and the white page before him. No blue ribbon on this copy, as it's just come from my computer printer. _

"_Of course it's about you."_

"_Bella." He shakes his head. "I wish I were as good with words as you are." Good with words, and yet I can find none to tell him what the words he does say do to me. "This is exactly right," he says, shaking the paper slightly. "This…you know I feel exactly this way too, right?"_

"_I do now," I tell him, only half-teasing._

"_Bella, I love you so much." He pulls me roughly toward him, and I'm anticipating his mouth on mine, but instead he wraps his arms around me and pulls me into his chest, pressing his lips to the crown of my head. "You were wrong about one thing, though."_

"_What?" I say, voice muffled against the warm cotton covering his chest._

"_There are no prettier girls in that school than you." A lie, but it's the loveliest one anyone's ever bothered to tell me._

"_Yeah, right," I tell him, but the warm buzz of pleased satisfaction hums in my chest. _

. . .

**Thanks for reading. Thanks for the lovely reviews. Thanks, even, for the less so. And thanks for all of the new quotes on forgiveness; such wise words. xo**

**Another update later today because tomorrow real life might be chaotic. **


	11. Drape, Grape, Scrape

**Thanks so much for reading, and for the reviews. I love how strongly you all feel already, even without knowing where this is going. And I love how many of you say that you can relate, somehow, to some part of this; it's amazing, the degree to which being young is a universal experience. xo**

. . .

_**February 13, 2013 – Word Prompt: Drape, Grape, Scrape**_

. . .

Charlie's DVD player is busted, and thanks I'm sure to the gods of misfortune, I find myself watching a typically dated high school romance that I did, in fact, watch when I was in high school. I remember watching it with Edward, who grumbled good-naturedly about "chick-flicks," but who begrudgingly admitted after the fact that he actually enjoyed it.

Now I watch Freddie Prinze, Jr. turn the ugly duckling into the beautiful swan simply by removing her glasses, and I want to hurl Charlie's beer can at the screen. As if anyone would believe that behind those thick-framed lenses, Rachael Leigh Cook was anything other than gorgeous. No wonder teenage girls are so confused all the time. Not only are we expected to believe that a lifetime of ostracism can be rectified by changing our accessories, but we're supposed to buy into these movies wherein high school is portrayed as the scene of innocent hijinks and harmless conflicts. Hollywood circa 1999 didn't seem to get that high school was far more sinister than it would have us believe, and that the damage it can leave can't always be erased by a coat of lip gloss or a little black dress. That something a thirty-year-old might be able to laugh off can leave a scar on a teenage heart that either splits with every subsequent move or heals over so tough that the organ beneath it can never again be penetrated.

Sometimes, it turns out, the heart can ache to hold on to something even as the brain whispers to let it go.

. . .

_I grip the red plastic cup that Edward filled with Coke, telling me that if anyone asked, I could lie and say there was rum in it. Mike Newton's parents are gone for the weekend, and he's having a New Year's Eve "party" with just enough partygoers for it to get stupid. The group is a combination of Forks seniors and Mike's older sister's friends, who are home from their various colleges and carry with them the worldly air of having been away from home for four whole months. Edward's nursing a beer, his arm draped casually but demonstratively around my shoulders; I wear it like a cloak against these people who are sort of his friends and only mine by proxy. The only time his arm disappears is when it's his turn to launch a ping-pong ball toward a triangle of cups, and I don't quite understand why I feel so exposed without its reassuring weight. _

_When Mike shoves Ben Cheney for no apparent reason, he falls into the beer pong table, breaking the plywood down the middle and earning both him and Mike a round of boos and insults from the assembled partygoers. "New game," Mike announces, relishing the authority afforded him by being party host. "'Never Have I Ever.'"_

_A brief explanation of rules – drink if you've done it – and already I'm uncomfortable. Even if my cup were filled with straight vodka, something tells me I'd have no problem walking a straight line out of this party when the game is over. Edward gives me a reassuring smile, but I can see uncertainty in his eyes._

_Mike's up first. "Said, 'I love you.'" A soft smile as Edward takes a sip of his beer and I sip my soda._

_Mike's sister. "Had an orgasm." I'm the only one besides the girl who said it that doesn't drink, and Edward's eyes are on me as he lifts his cup to his lips. I blush as I realize what that means, and Mike elbows Edward. "Damn, Cullen, take care of your girl, man." I'm immediately sorry that I agreed to participate._

_Rosalie smirks at the group. "Touched a girl's tits." I blush, and Edward swirls his beer around in his hand; he's the only guy who doesn't drink, and I am awash with secondhand embarrassment. _

_Lauren, of course, takes Rosalie's lead. "Fingered a girl." My lack of intake indicates nothing; Edward, once again, is the lone guy not drinking._

_Tyler. "Given oral sex." Edward's ears are pink and he's staring down into his nearly full cup._

_Jessica. "Received oral sex." Thankfully, most of the girls don't drink to this one, and Edward has company in Ben._

_Ben. "Had sex." Rosalie, Lauren, Tyler, Mike, and a handful of the college kids drink. I'm terrified of where else this particular line of questioning can go, and I realize it's Edward's turn to confess a truth. It makes my heart hurt to realize how much he's already confessed – how much we've both revealed – without saying a word._

"_I, uh, need to take a leak," he says instead, rising from the small circle and crossing the room to the dresser, placing his cup on the table beside the cooler of liquor-infused grape Kool-Aid and slipping through the door. I rise and follow him, and the catcalls that follow me aren't enough to make me regret doing so, even as I hear Rosalie mutter, "Maybe she'll at least hold it for him while he pisses."_

"_I'm sorry," he says to me as soon as I catch up with him in the kitchen, and I feel as though he's stolen my line._

"_What for?"_

"_We shouldn't have played. That was…embarrassing." The words would sound angry, if not for the dull tone in which he delivers them. I feel guilty and exposed and uncertain, and after a few beats of uncomfortable silence, he gives me a small smile. "Want to leave?" I nod, and he fishes his keys out of his pocket and hands them to me. _

_When I park in my driveway, Charlie's cruiser is gone, and I know he's working the New Year's Eve roadblock patrol. "Come in," I say softly. "Until you're sure you're okay to drive."_

"_I live around the block," he says, but he's unbuckling his seat belt anyway._

_On my sofa, his stubble scrapes my jaw as his hands find my breasts and I arch up into him, a thrill of scared excitement surging through me. "Oh my God," he murmurs, his fingers squeezing gently at flesh no one has ever touched before. I feel his thumbs pass over my nipples, and I whimper into his mouth. He pulls back, gazing down at me, his eyes as green as I've ever seen them. "Can I see them?"_

_I bite my lip. Even in this moment, with the effects of his kisses surging through my blood, I hesitate. I've bared every part of myself to him: my heart, my mind, my soul. I don't understand why baring my body makes me freeze up, fills me with such inexplicable unease. I open my mouth to speak, but I can't find the words. Edward's eyes dim almost imperceptibly, and he gives a short nod. "It's okay." He goes back to kissing me, but slides his hands back down my stomach and around my hips, to the small of my back that he knows is safe territory. I feel guilty for the swell of relief that washes over me when I realize, once again, that he won't push me. I throw myself into our kisses, determined to make them enough._

. . .


	12. Red

**Real life less chaotic than anticipated today, thanks to the little one's very first head cold. Ugh. Monday.**

**As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for the lovely reviews. xo**

. . .

_**February 14, 2013 – Word prompt: Red. Audio-visual challenge: Imagined image.**_

. . .

"Hey, Swan." Emmett sits on the top step of my father's porch, a puffy Patagonia parka making him look even more humongous than he does already. The apples of his cheeks and the tip of his nose are red, and I wonder how long he's been sitting here waiting for me. I'm surprised by his presence for many a reason, but I opt to address the most innocuous of them.

"Shouldn't you be helping your parents with party prep?"

He shrugs. "Probably." He pats the wooden step on which he's sitting, inviting me to sit next to him on my own porch. I don't have the energy to act affronted, and anyway, with Emmett, there's really no point. "It's really good to see you, Swan," he says as I settle and lay the newspaper I'd volunteered to pick up beside my hip. "I'm glad you came."

"I love your parents," I say. "They were always good to me." I look out at the front yard, where green blades of grass poke up through the already-melting snow. "You all were."

"Some more than others?" he asks, and when my head swivels to face him he's studying me intently, as if his words are a test. I don't know what he's looking for, but finally he sighs and returns his gaze to the lawn; I wonder what knowledge he gleaned from my reaction. "I hear you turned my brother down for a dance the other night."

I shrug. "I've turned your brother down a lot over the years; I'm sure he's used to it by now." Before he can address that, I change the subject. "Why weren't you there?"

"I just got into town yesterday morning."

"Oh."

I shift slightly on the cold wood, grateful that the overhang has at least kept it dry. "So, Swan, there's something you should know, and I feel like I should be the one to tell you."

My muscles are rigid, my heart rate picks up, and I curl and uncurl my fists. "Oh?"

His eyes slide over to me, and he drums his knuckles on his thighs. "I'm getting married."

"What?!" That was the absolute last thing I expected, and my entire body deflates in inexplicable relief. "Em, that's great – congratulations! I'm so happy for you!" I reach out and grab one of his fists in my hand, squeezing it in a pathetic substitute for the hug I would have given him if we were both standing. He places his other hand over mine, sandwiching it and effectively trapping me. "To Rosalie."

My short-lived relief vanishes; if I thought my muscles were tense before, now they are stone. "What?"

"I know. This could be…awkward. But Edward thought you should know, and he's right, and I thought I should be the one to tell you." He's studying me again, but I'm too railroaded to worry what kind of truths my face is telling without my permission. "Bella, I'm marrying Rosalie."

. . .

"_It's only a matter of time," I hear Rosalie say from the other side of the library shelf, and I'm only halfway paying attention until I hear his name. "Lord knows Edward's balls have to be blue by now." My head snaps up, and I'm staring at the spines of a row of books on South America. "I get that they're childhood sweethearts or whatever, but it's one thing to be dating your childhood sweetheart and another thing to be dating a CHILD. Lord knows she's built like one." I hug my reference book to my apparently nonexistent chest and swallow the knot that is suddenly at the back of my throat. "I mean it's no great surprise that she's a virgin, but for him not to be getting any action is a TRAGEDY. Like those Italian ones we read in English all the time."_

"_Aren't they Greek?" The new voice belongs to Jessica, Rosalie's second-in-bitch-command._

"_Whatever. Point is, it's time for Edward Cullen to experience all of the pleasure that dating has to offer when it's done with someone who isn't afraid of what he's got in his pants."_

_My feet finally unstick themselves from the floor and I bolt, snatching my backpack from the chair and making a break for the door; it isn't until the alarm goes off that I realize I'm still clutching the guidebook to Rio de Janeiro to my chest like a breastplate. _

_That night, with Charlie working, Edward comes over to watch a movie with me and is pleasantly surprised when, five minutes into _Old School_, I'm lying on top of him on the sofa, kissing him with everything I have and running my hands up the warm skin of his stomach. He's grunting into my mouth, and when I feel his hips buck ever so slightly up into me, his arousal is once again between us._

Lord knows Edward's balls have to be blue by now.

_I banish the taunting words, the teasing tone to the back of my mind and before I can lose my nerve, run my hands back down his stomach to his waistband, finding his belt buckle with clumsy fingers and trying to slip it free without looking. When I can't, I return my hands to the skin beneath his belly button, a not-quite-innocent expanse of skin I've seen a million times, but never touched._

"_Please," he pants, his hands sliding all over me – over jeans, over sweater, over skin. His kisses are making me delirious, nearly desperate with want, but not enough to entirely eradicate the ever-present anxiety._

"_Edward," I breathe, gasping as he rolls us over, and his hands slide the button of my jeans free before I even realize they're there. I wrap my fingers around his, stilling his movements._

"_Please don't stop," he begs into the skin of my neck, pressing his erection into my hip, and I gasp as trepidation begins to ebb away my arousal. He slides his hand into the open fly of my jeans, pressing his warm palm to the front of my underwear, and before I can curb the reaction, my entire body goes rigid. He notices, and after a few moments of panting into my hair, our hearts hammering against each other, he pulls back and sits upright on the sofa, running a hand through his disheveled hair and looking at the muted TV._

"_Edward?"_

"_Just…give me a sec," he says, his voice gentle but his words frustrated. I don't say anything, buttoning my jeans back up with trembling fingers as our breaths slow. Finally, Edward lets his head fall back to rest against the back of the sofa. "You okay?" he asks finally. _

_Guilt. "Yes."_

"_What…" He pauses, licks his lips. "Want to tell me what that was about?"_

_Embarrassed tears threaten to gather along my eyelids as I move my gaze to his hands, which are resting on his thighs. "I just…I thought I could. I thought…" My voice begins to wobble just as my chin does, and I close my eyes, the threatening tears escaping and sliding down my face._

"_Bella?" The thin trace of frustration in his voice has yielded to concern._

_I shake my head. "I just…I know all the other guys in your grade are doing it already, and I'm holding you back."_

"_Hey." He angles his body to face me, grabbing my wrists in his gentle hands and rubbing soothing circles on my skin with his thumbs as the tears I can't seem to stop slip silently over my cheeks. "Hey," he says again. "Bella, I love you. You are not holding me back. I do want to, and when you're ready, we will. Okay?"_

"_I don't…want you to get sick of waiting for me."_

"_That won't happen."_

_I finally find the nerve to peek up at him, and the love in his eyes – despite the tightness that still lingers along the line of his jaw, the heavy breaths that still lift and drop his chest – makes me feel safe, relieved, grateful that he can forgive me my insecurities, that I've been saved from the ugly meanness of Rosalie Hale. "I love you, too," I whisper, and he pulls me into a tight hug. I listen to his heartbeat against my ear, and I wonder what it will take for me to finally feel ready to give him the only part of me he doesn't already have. I feel the faint trace of his fingers over my back, drawing indistinct patterns that feel like letters and words he's branding into my skin, but I don't ask what they are. I don't have to._

. . .


	13. Graceful

**Thanks, as always, for reading. xo**

. . .

_**February 15, 2013 – Word prompt: Graceful. Plot Generator – Phrase Catch: Playing for keeps. **_

. . .

"How can he be marrying her?"

I hear Alice sigh through the phone. "See, _this_ is why I wanted to meet you for coffee."

"It doesn't make any sense," I continue, ignoring her interjection altogether.

"They reconnected a few years ago when we were all back in town for Christmas." The way she says "we were all back" makes me feel like I'm fifteen and was excluded when all my friends went to the mall. Granted, Charlie comes to visit me in San Francisco for Christmas the years I'm not in Forks, and even when I am in town I don't spend it with the Cullens, but still. The unpleasant taste of being the catalyst behind my own ostracism lingers on my tongue; it is as if, by declining to forgive and forget, I orchestrated my own isolation. Off my silence, my friend sighs again. "I'm picking you up in ten minutes. Be ready." There's a click, and she hasn't given me time to decline.

"Hey," she says nine minutes later, standing on my doorstep decked out in designer.

"Hi," I return, slipping out the door before Charlie can appear in the space behind me and ask where I'm going. I left his newspaper on the counter and the coffeepot brewing in hopes that my absence would barely register. I follow her down the porch steps and watch as she slides gracefully into the driver's seat of an Audi the color of sunshine before slipping into the passenger seat.

"Nice wheels."

"Thanks," she says, putting the car into Reverse. "Christmas gift from Jasper."

"Wow. So life as a musician is going well, then."

Her eyes slide over to me before returning to the front and pushing the car into Drive. "Jasper works for Merrill Lynch now," she says. "Has been for nearly two years."

"Oh." I frown at the road ahead. "Sorry. I didn't know."

A lyric of the song playing at a low enough volume that I have to strain catches my ear. _A hollow sound is ringing where your heart used to be._ "I like this," I say, gesturing awkwardly toward the stereo. "Who is it?"

"Elle King," Alice replies, turning the volume up slightly from the control panel embedded in her steering wheel. "'Playing for Keeps.'"

I nod, listening to the melancholy lyrics that are somewhat at odds with the upbeat tempo.

_Well, I bet you're sorry now. You did this to yourself._

_It's a lonely road where the forgotten go, where your misery finds its company._

As we drive in relative silence the rest of the way to the diner, I force myself not to remember ice cream sundaes and games of footsie beneath Formica tabletops. Once we're settled with twin mugs between us, Alice sighs. "Bella, Jasper and I are going to be getting engaged soon." I feel my eyes and mouth widen. "We're not yet, so please don't say anything, but we will be soon. We didn't want to steal Emmett and Rosalie's thunder, and we're still shopping for rings so he hasn't actually proposed yet, but it's coming. And when it does, I'm going to expect you, as my good friend, to be in my wedding. And Jasper's going to expect Edward to be in it as well. And the reason I'm telling you all this is because maybe it's time to…make peace with things. I know he hurt you, and I know what happened was awful, and I'm not saying it wasn't. But maybe it's time to let it be in the past."

"It is in the past," I say, feeling my defenses rise as I curl a hand around my mug.

"But you still don't want to be around him," Alice presses, and I'm slightly taken aback by this new, blunt version of my old friend. "You still called me in a fit when you found out about Rosalie. The event is in the past, but it seems like the way you feel about it is still very current."

"He broke my heart, Alice," I say, angry at the tightness in my throat that still wells up even after all these years. Angry at the fact that I still feel like that seventeen-year-old girl in this moment, when everyone else has apparently moved on.

"I know," she says, and her immediately gentle tone only makes the ache build. "I know he did. And I'm not making excuses or apologies for him. My point is that he took enough from you back then; I hate to think that you're still letting him take things from you now."

"I'm not," I say, but the words taste suspiciously like a lie.

"I haven't seen you in almost three years, and before Esme and Carlisle decided to renew their vows, I hadn't talked to you in nearly eighteen months." Guilt is a wall I slam into, and I can't meet her eye. "And I know life gets busy and everything else, but we've been friends for years, and I can't help thinking that if I weren't in love with Edward's brother, I would have heard from you when you published your book. Or when you came back into town for a visit. Or anytime, really. I feel like if I hadn't fallen for Jasper, I'd know what your apartment looks like and what you do when you're not writing books and whether you've been in love since high school."

"My apartment's tiny, and I freelance," I reply, a half-hearted attempt at levity. It doesn't escape my notice that I ignore her third question altogether. The look in her sharp gray eyes tells me it didn't escape hers, either.

"I miss my friend," she says finally, softly, and I break her gaze to stare into the dark surface of my black coffee; unfortunately, my own eyes gaze back at me, and they're no more comforting than Alice's gray ones.

"Me, too," I say, and I feel her small hand wrap around mine for a beat before letting go.

. . .

"_I'm just…not ready, and I don't know why." I try to keep my foot from twitching as Alice paints my baby toe a ridiculously bright shade of pink. She straightens to consider her handiwork before moving on to my next toe. _

"_Well, you don't have to know why," she says simply. "If you're not ready, you're not ready." Sometimes I envy Alice's ability to see things in black and white, but then I think black and white must be easy when she doesn't have heated green eyes boring into hers, silently asking permission she isn't ready to give. "I guess," I say, and she peeks up at me from beneath her dark bangs._

"_He's not pressuring you, is he?"_

_I shake my head. "No." I don't explicate, don't explain that while I don't feel pressured by Edward, I do feel pressured by everything else: the fact that we've been together for two years, the fact that I've known him – and loved him – for much longer, the fact that everyone else is starting to have opinions about the status of Edward's and my lack of sex life. I'm pressuring myself, and while Edward isn't overtly pressuring me, the knowledge of what he wants is its own kind of pressure. "He isn't," I add, but my best friend can hear the words I don't say._

"_But?"_

"_But I don't understand why I can't," I admit, watching her precise painting. "I love him. God, Alice, I love him so much. And sometimes I think maybe I want to. But then we're together and I just…freeze."_

"_Maybe that's your subconscious doing you a favor," she suggests, my third toenail getting its coat of pink. "I mean, it's not something you can take back if you regret it. And Lord knows once you do it once, he's going to want to do it all the time." That thought hadn't occurred to me, and if anything, it only fills me with more dread. Alice continues, entirely oblivious to my silent panic. "And what if you got pregnant? I mean, your dad would probably shoot him."_

"_He'd wear a condom," I argue halfheartedly, even as I'm not sure why I bother. A part of me was hoping Alice would tell me I'm being silly, worrying too much about something that's not a big deal, convince me to just do it already, but she's as much a virgin as I am. "I'm really…I'm not afraid I'll get pregnant." I sigh as she finishes my left foot. _

"_Then what are you afraid of?" Alice squints at my toes._

_And isn't that the million-dollar question? "I don't know." God, I wish I did. "I'm afraid it will hurt," I say after a moment, and the moment the words leave my lips I know they're at least part cop-out. The implication is the lie, even if the words are truth._

"_It probably will," she says, finally looking up at me. "But I've heard that part doesn't last that long and isn't really that bad."_

_I nod, despite the fact that I don't believe her. How can being pried open not hurt?_

. . .


	14. Artificial

_**February 16, 2013 – Word Prompt: Artificial.**_

. . .

"I just have to pick up the arrangement Esme wanted for tonight's dinner," Alice says, and once again the pang of envy at her role as surrogate daughter niggles at the edges of my mind. "Would you mind going with me? You can hold on to it so it doesn't tip over and I'll drop you off afterward."

"Okay."

At the florist, I hang back while Alice chats with the woman behind the counter and settles Esme's bill. I wander around the tiny store, gazing at the displays of arrangements in all the shades of harvest, red and gold and burnt sienna blooms amid clusters of artificial berries and pinecones. In the middle of the store, an enormous cornucopia sits on a stand with colorful ears of corn and sunflowers spilling out of it.

"Here," I hear from over my shoulder, and turn to see an elegant arrangement of flowers in the dappled hues of autumn. "Are you okay to hold on to this?" comes Alice's voice from behind the blooms, and I nod before realizing she can't see me.

"Yeah. I got it." Clutching the base of the arrangement, I follow the sound of her voice to the car and ease myself into the leather seat before she pushes the door gently shut and reappears beside me as we navigate the damp roads. It doesn't really hit me until we're turning onto the Cullens' street that I'm about to be back in the house of Scrabble and blanket forts and hot chocolate, and a sudden swell of panic crests behind my breastbone. My mind flashes briefly to Alice's words from earlier, and I try to convince myself that seeing Esme before the party is advisable, given that the last time I saw her I was screaming curses at her son and dissolving in a flurry of tears.

When she parks in the driveway, Alice grabs a paper bag that I hadn't noticed from behind the passenger seat and glances at me. "Do you think you can handle that?"

"If you can open my door," I say, and she nods before slipping from the car and reappearing on my side of it. I grunt rather inelegantly as I get out and cradle the base of the arrangement in my arms. "Just don't let me trip up the stairs or anything," I say, and I hear her laugh as she slips a hand into the crook of my arm.

As she pushes the front door open and I step over the threshold, I'm assaulted by recollection even though I can't see a thing past the cluster of flowers in front of my face: the childhood home of the boy I loved is an olfactory memory I would have thought I'd forgotten, but as it envelops me, I swallow the lump that rises in my throat.

"Hey, Alice." The lump becomes a tight knot at the familiar voice, and I'm suddenly grateful for the shield. "And hey…floating flower arrangement." There's laughter in his voice, and for some reason I don't want to examine, I yearn to retain my anonymity for just one more moment so that he can say something else. I haven't heard levity in that voice in years, and it makes parts of me hurt that I thought were long dead. "Mom probably wants that in the kitchen for now. Here, let me…" The cheerful voice trails off and I feel warm fingers brush against mine as they relieve me of my burden. When the flowers are lowered from in front of me and I meet familiar yet foreign green eyes over top of it, they widen in surprise.

"Bella!"

"Hi." I see the moment the shutters come down and feel stupid at my regret: I am, after all, the one who wanted them. Not for the first time, I wish there was a way to erase the past, wish there was a way to go back to seeing the boy I loved who would never hurt me instead of the boy I loved who did. "I can't stay," I say, even though no one's asked me to, and I'm too aware of the fact that Edward hasn't taken a single step toward the kitchen, clutching the gargantuan arrangement at his waist and watching me silently. I'm uncomfortable under his scrutiny, and while he's never felt more like a stranger, the familiarity of his green eyes takes me back to the boy with the pillow forts and the hot chocolate and the gentle words instead of the teenager with the inadequate apologies and someone else's kisses on his lips.

. . .

"_What?" I shake my head, as if there's a fog in my brain that could have made me mishear her words._

"_I don't know." Alice looks unsure, scared, apologetic. "It was just something I heard. I don't know if it's true, but I couldn't not tell you. I don't think it's true. I mean, I don't think he would have…" She trails off, apparently not willing to say the words "kissed someone else" twice in the span of two minutes._

_For the rest of the day, when I see Edward in the hallways, I turn and walk the other way. When he tries to catch my eye across the room in Trig, I look away; when the bell rings, I bolt before he can catch me. After school, he snags my elbow in the parking lot before I can make it to my truck. "Bella, what the hell? What's wrong?" I lick my lips and meet his gentle eyes, his brow furrowed in concern. "What happened?"_

"_You tell me."_

_Deeper frown. "What?"_

_I swallow down fear, muster up courage. "You tell me, Edward. Tell me you didn't kiss someone else."_

_His eyes widen, then narrow, then go flat, and I have my answer before he says it aloud. My own eyes fill, and I turn away before any tears can escape._

"_It didn't mean anything."_

"_It does to me."_

"_Bella."_

"_How can a kiss with me be 'enough,' and a kiss with someone else mean nothing?"_

"_Your kisses are more than enough," he says, desperation heavy in his words, and my mind flashes to all the times I have apologized for not being ready for more. Not being ready to take things further. In this moment, I am equal parts grateful and sorry that I was such a coward. _

"_Apparently not."_

"_Please," he says. "Let me explain."_

"_No." For the first time in my life, I walk away from him without a backward glance._

. . .

**Here's where things get bumpy. Rough few chapters ahead, just so you know. Remember when, at the very beginning, I mentioned that this Edward isn't perfect? We're there.**

**Also, thank you so much for the well-wishes for the little one, and for the suggestions – you're all so kind! She's feeling much better, and we got our first giggle, so it more than made up for days of snot-baby. **

**Thanks, as well, for the lovely reviews. I wish I could respond to all of them, but the tiny humans barely give me time to post these already-written chapters. Know, though, that I read and cherish and appreciate every last one. xo**


	15. Retrieve

**A/N: **Please note: I have changed this story's label to "friendship/angst." I genuinely don't think this story is "angst" – at least, not in comparison with many I've read (and written) that are labeled as such – but I do make every attempt to be sensitive to things that may bother readers. Therefore, if the possibility that you may be in some way triggered by this story exists, I urge you to read elsewhere. If you were negatively affected by the path this story has taken, I apologize. That said, this story is, at its root, about friendship. So that one stays. (It likely comes as no surprise that I hate labels. In fic and in life.)

If this is not the story for you, that's okay. There are plenty others out there. Thanks for giving it a try anyway, and happy reading. xo

Also, I'm staring down the barrel of a 10-hour road trip with a two-month-old and a three-year-old tomorrow, but I will do my best to get the next chapter posted.

As always, thanks for reading. Onward. xo

. . .

_**February 18, 2013 – Word Prompt: Retrieve. Dialogue Flex: "I'm glad you're feeling better." **_

"Oh, Bella, love, I'm so happy to see you!" Esme's hug is like a time machine; for a moment, I'm a fifteen-year-old girl with a poorly-disguised crush and whipped cream on the tip her nose. "Thank you so much for coming. When your dad told me you'd be here, I can't tell you how glad I was."

"Thanks, Esme. It's really good to see you, too." One of the countless sad things about losing Edward was losing his family, too. "Congratulations," I add, and she waves me off.

"Thank you. I know some people think it's silly, the whole vow renewal thing, but we didn't want to just throw an anniversary party, and we figured after thirty years, people might cut us some slack."

"I'd say it's definitely worth celebrating," I say, flashing briefly to my own parents, who barely made it a decade.

"And we figured that if we had it Thanksgiving weekend, we had a better chance of getting all of our kids home at once." I laugh, remembering how Esme would bribe Emmett and Jasper to come home for long weekends from their respective colleges. She must have been so sad when Edward went all the way to Chicago. "I'm so glad you're feeling better," she says, smiling into my face, still holding my wrists in her cool hands.

"I'm sorry?"

"The other night, when you left the club. Edward said…" She trails off, glancing from her son to me, and I can see that he took it upon himself to excuse my abrupt exit from the bar after I rather unceremoniously turned down his request for a dance. "Well, anyway," she finishes, squeezing both of my hands in hers. "I'm so glad you're here. And thank you for helping Alice pick up the arrangement. If I'd realized it was such a monstrosity, I'd never have asked her to do it. Shelly does beautiful work, but sometimes she lets her artistic flair get the better of her good sense. I admit, I'm mildly concerned what tomorrow's centerpieces are going to look like."

I smile. "I'm sure they'll be beautiful." After all, everything even remotely related to the Cullens is always beautiful.

Their home.

Their parties.

Their sons.

Why would their floral arrangements be any different?

"You will come to dinner tonight, won't you?"

"Oh," I stutter, glancing to Alice for help, but she's murmuring with Jasper across the room and has left me out to dry. The only person who notices my despair is Edward, and I'd rather eat that monstrosity of a floral arrangement than give him the chance to come to my rescue. "That's really kind of you, Esme, but I promised Charlie I'd spend some time with him tonight. He's been out of town, and I have to leave right after Thanksgiving."

"Bring him!" she replies warmly and without hesitation. "We don't see nearly enough of your dad, considering we're practically neighbors. There'll be plenty of food, and it will give us a chance to chat that we probably won't have tomorrow night when more family is milling about."

"Thanks. I appreciate the invitation. I'll ask Charlie; he only just got back from a few days of ice fishing, so he still might be thawing out." I force a smile to my lips, and Esme does the same, her shrewd eyes searching mine for the unspoken, and not for the first time, I miss Edward's family with a sharp longing that makes me want to lunge forward and hug Esme around the waist. I miss his mother, who was more like my own than my own; I miss her concern, her affection, her tendency to push when she feels like she isn't getting the whole story. I miss them all, even as I have to force myself not to look back in Edward's direction as I leave.

. . .

"_I need to know what happened. I need to understand." My eyes are as pleading as my words, and I'm hoping the fact that he's able to look me in the eye means this isn't as bad as I've been making it out to be since Alice blindsided me in the hallway this morning. That it's not too late to retrieve what we had. His eyes seem to be begging right back, but while I'm asking for answers, he's asking for forgiveness. I hope I can give it to him, because sitting across from him with my arms folded across my chest feels foreign and slightly scary. It's been ages since we sat this close without touching at least some part of each other, and I want nothing more than to unfold my arms and wrap them around his neck. Still, I remain sitting with them crossed in front of me: a shield to protect me, a knot to hold me together. I hope I won't need either._

_He blows out a breath. "It was…stupid. She said she knew that we weren't…y'know. Doing anything." He glances up at me in apology, as if this is the transgression. "And she said she could help me out with that. 'Relieve some tension,' she said. So that I could focus on going slow with you."_

_My mind flashes to the feel of his body pressed to mine as his tongue licks fire against my mouth and the pained groans that sometimes escape his lips when I pull away. I'm seeking answers, but his words only give me more questions. "How does kissing relieve tension?"_

_He frowns. "What?"_

"_Kissing," I say, remembering once again that every time we make out, it only seems to fuel the fire rather than diminish it. "I don't understand why she thought kissing would relieve any tension." He looks panicked, and after a split second of confusion, my stomach drops. "That wasn't all."_

_It's the first time he looks down, and any hope that this might have hurt less than I anticipated vanishes. "She…touched me. I tried to stop her, but she…touched me some."_

_I want to close my eyes, to run, to leave before it can get any worse, but I'm glued to the top step. "Touched you where?"_

"_Bella—"_

"_Touched you where?"_

_His eyes are glistening and he waves a hand in the direction of his lap. I nod, feeling suddenly, oddly, numb. "Where I won't," I say for him. "She touched you where I won't."_

"_Bella," he says again, but that's it. He doesn't say anything else, and I sit, stupidly, waiting for him to spit out the words that will somehow negate the pain tearing through my chest, but apparently he reaches the same conclusion I do: they don't exist._

"_I hope it was worth it," I say, surprised at the fact that my voice doesn't falter, doesn't shake, doesn't break when my insides are doing all three. I rise from the step and take one last look at him before turning my back and walking inside my house. I don't even slam the door, but the click when it shuts is the loudest thing I've ever heard._

_Four hours later, the calm I'd managed to achieve on that front porch is nowhere to be found, and I'm curled up in a ball in the middle of my bedspread, head pounding from hours of sobbing and nose too stuffy to breathe through. Salt is drying on my cheeks and my eyes are burning and feel three sizes bigger than normal. I ignored the phone that rang every ten minutes until Charlie came home, and when I heard the muffled murmur of him answering it through the floorboards and the heavy thuds of his feet climbing the stairs, I told him through the door that I didn't want to talk to Edward. Or anyone. After a characteristically gruff offer to talk if I wanted to, Charlie retreated downstairs and left me to suffer my heartbreak in peace._

_I stare at my wall, feeling like the cliché of every teenage girl with a broken heart, except that this _must_ be different because it's Edward. It's _us._ Surely not every broken heart hurts this badly; if it does, how does anyone ever find the will to get out of bed the morning after? I realize suddenly that I'm going to have to go to school tomorrow, and wish idly that he could have broken my heart on a Friday instead of some otherwise ordinary Tuesday._

_As it turns out, getting out of bed the Wednesday morning after a broken heart isn't the hardest thing ever. _

_As it turns out, things can always get worse._

_In fact, they usually do._

_. . ._


	16. Cord

******Sorry I didn't get to post this yesterday. Three minutes into the ten-hour drive, the three-year-old asks, "Almost there?" ********Long car rides with kids, man. **

******Anyway, this is yesterday's chapter; today's will post shortly, too. And a note regarding the reclassification: nothing about the story arc has changed. If I could use three categories, "romance" would still be in there. So the arc of the story is still what it was when I began posting. I hope this answers those questions! :)**

**Thanks, as always, for reading. xo**

. . .

_**February 19, 2013 – Word Prompt: Cord. Plot Generator – Idea Completion: Making a mountain out of a molehill.**_

. . .

"_Bella, I don't think you want to do that." Alice's face is grave._

"_Why? I mean, he made a mistake. I know that. He knows that. But…I love him. I want to at least try to understand why he did it. I want to at least see if maybe I can forgive him. If maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion." I don't tell her the rest: that it's been a week, and I'm not sure I'm meant to be without him; that the pain of his betrayal is doubled by the pain of not being his. I'm ashamed to admit to being that weak._

"_I don't think this is exactly a 'mountain-out-of-a-molehill' situation," she says, her words uncharacteristically cryptic. _

"_What?"_

_She chews her lip before responding. "What if there was more you had to forgive him for?"_

_I sit, as if my body anticipates the blow before my mind knows it's coming. "What does that mean?"_

_A sigh. "The baseball team's party the other night. He went. It was at Rosalie's." I shake my head but say nothing, so Alice continues. "He had sex with her."_

"_No, he didn't," I say immediately. Reflexively. He wouldn't. He couldn't have. There's no way we had a fight and then three days later he lost his virginity to someone else. There's just…no way._

"_Angela told me during study hall," Alice says, and I'm confused by the tears in her eyes. Surely, if one of us is crying, it should be me. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – my body seems to be entirely focused on the suddenly complex task of breathing. In. Out. "He was drunk," she offers; again, I shake my head. _

"_Edward doesn't get drunk." Immediately, I want to suck the words back into my mouth. As if I know anything about Edward after all._

"_He was upset," Alice says, discreetly wiping a tear from her cheek. "Angela said he was really upset about you guys breaking up and Ben kept giving him shots and Rosalie was hanging all over him."_

_I close my eyes and know immediately it's a mistake; an image of Rosalie kissing Edward, of Edward touching Rosalie, flashes behind my closed eyelids. My eyes fly open. "I think…" I lurch from the bed, nearly tripping as I lunge for the door. "I think I'm going to be sick."_

_Alice holds my hair as I throw up, then holds my hand as I break down._

. . .

"What are you doing here?"

"That's becoming her standard greeting," Charlie says from behind me, but the humor leaves his eyes when he sees the man standing on his porch. "Though in this case, I'd say it's a valid question."

"Chief Swan," Edward says with a polite nod. "I just stopped by to see if I could have a word with Bella."

Charlie looks at me, and I have a brief flashback to the days when Edward and I were first dating, and our parents were trying to adjust to that fact, trying to redraw lines that hadn't been moved since we were toddlers. I would stand inside our front door just like this, asking permission to go out with my boyfriend, when in years past I would simply tell Charlie I was going to Edward's and let the door slam behind me before he could even answer. His face looks just like it did then, as if weighing what letting me go with Edward might mean. What it might cost one or both of us. Finally, he shrugs. "That's up to Bella, I'd say." He disappears back into the house to punctuate his point. Or perhaps he simply doesn't want to bear witness.

"Hi," Edward says, his hands once again in his pockets.

"Hello." Cool, detached. I can do this.

"Would you come for a walk with me?"

"Edward, it's practically winter." He looks confused, as if the idea that I might not enjoy taking a stroll while my nose gets frostbitten hadn't occurred to him. I sigh. "We can sit," I say, gesturing vaguely to the porch steps.

"Okay." We settle side by side on the top step, just as I'd sat beside Emmett. It occurs to me that the last time I sat beside this boy on this step he was breaking my heart, severing the cord that had tethered us to each other for far longer than the two years I'd been his girlfriend. I risk a sideways glance at him, and once upon a time I might have been able to tell if his thoughts were taking the same path as my own. As it is, his face is nearly a stranger's, and I know nothing. "I… Bella, I feel like there's so much to say and I wanted us to have the chance to say it before tomorrow. Or tonight."

"I'd never wreck your parents' party."

He shakes his head. "I didn't mean that. I just…I'd like it if we were more comfortable around each other. I don't want to spend the whole night on the opposite side of the room from you."

I shift as the cold of the wooden porch step seeps through my jeans. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"I don't think—" He blows out a breath. "I think maybe it's what I have to say."

"Okay."

"Okay." He rubs his palms against the thighs of his jeans, and his eyes track over the vacant front yard before he turns them on me. "I'm sorry. That's first, because it's the most important. I'm so sorry." He pauses, as if to give me chance to respond; I still don't know what I'm supposed to say, so I stay silent. "Bella, I was a teenage kid bulldozed by hormones. I'm not proud of it, nor am I using it as any sort of justification. I just…I know it doesn't make any sense to you, but when I was around you I could barely refrain from just launching myself at you. I always wanted to be touching you. All the time. I wanted to kiss you for hours, and touch you, and do everything with you. And I knew you weren't ready, and that was okay, and I'll regret for the rest of my life that what I did when I wasn't thinking made you doubt that I was happy to wait for you. _Wanted_ to wait for you."

I look away from his earnest eyes. "Clearly you didn't."

"What happened with Rosalie shouldn't have happened."

I pin him with a glare. "Which time are you talking about there, Edward?"

He looks chastened. "The first time." A cringe. "I mean, both times, obviously, but right now I'm talking about the first time. I realize how stupid it's going to sound, but I didn't really realize what she was doing until her hand was down my pants, and I'd just… I'd never been touched before, and my body reacted before my brain could catch up. And it did, it caught up, but by that point I was half gone. I closed my eyes and all I could see was you. I'd been dreaming about feeling your hands on me for so long, and I just…all I could see was you."

Now I feel sick. "Stop," I whisper; he steamrolls my words, ignoring them.

"God, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. So sorry that my stupid, teenage hormones wrecked us. So, so fucking sorry."

"You think I wasn't hormonal, too? You think I didn't want you, too?" Because I did, even if I didn't know what to do with it. But this truth, this honesty, is one he doesn't deserve.

He shakes his head. "I didn't think that."

"Here's something I've always been curious about." He nods, and I ask him the question that has always bothered me about cheaters. "The way I see it, one of two things is true: either you thought of me when it was happening and you decided to do it anyway, or you didn't think about me at all." He appears to be waiting for more, but I don't have any more to give him. When he realizes that's my question, his shoulders slump as if he knows there's no way to reclaim whatever he hoped might be salvageable.

"Which answer would be the better one?"

"I don't know," I tell him honestly, and I don't.

"I never stopped thinking about you," he says after a pause in which I watch our breaths combine and swirl silver in the space between us. "Not then and not since."

"What about the second time?"

His self-loathing is nearly palpable, and I'm ashamed to realize I'm enjoying his pain. In some fucked up way, it's like vindication for seventeen-year-old Bella. "I was drunk." Another head-shake. "Again, not an excuse. I just…I was just so sad. Sad, and drunk, and miserable, and heartbroken, and so, so fucking angry with myself for hurting you, for ruining everything. And she was there." He looks away. "In hindsight, I suppose I was hoping that I could find at least some tiny way in which I could feel something good, but the whole time, all I could think about was how I always thought my first time would be with you." He swallows, and when he looks back up at me, his eyes are glistening. "I always wanted it to be with you."

"But you couldn't wait," I spit, and he flinches as if I've struck him.

"I'm sorry," he says again, and perhaps it's six years of hurt or perhaps it's because suddenly, in this moment, he's eighteen and I'm seventeen and he's breaking me all over again, but I'm grateful for the sudden surge of anger that courses through me.

"Sorry's an awfully pretty word, Edward. But here's the thing about words: in the end, they don't mean anything."

"Don't," he says, a flicker of fire in his sea of misery. "How can you say that? You love words. You've always loved words. You used to say words mean everything."

I look away. "I used to say a lot of things." _I love you. I want you. I trust you. _Still facing the railing, I say new words. "Please leave."

. . .


	17. Bewilder

**Thanks for being awesome. xo**

. . .

_**February 20, 2013 – Word Prompts: Beguile, belittle, bewilder**_

. . .

In the end, I'm able to escape Esme's invitation to join the pseudo-rehearsal-Thanksgiving dinner, and I use Charlie's distaste for even remotely formal dinner parties as the excuse. Instead, I shut myself in my bedroom after we've gorged ourselves on turkey and stuffing and lose myself in nearly-forgotten mementos, things that mattered once upon a time, and try to figure out why this one thing still matters so very much. I'm faintly amazed by how much _stuff_ still remains in my old bedroom, equal parts surprised Charlie hasn't chucked it out and surprised at how much I left behind. How much I ran away from.

Eyeballing my bookshelf, I spy the small row of yearbooks on the top shelf and stretch to my toes, reaching for the navy blue spine of the tome from my junior year. When I open it, I remember: I got it toward the end of the year, months after Edward and I broke up, and the only person I let sign it was Alice. Returning it to its shelf, I pull down the one from the year prior; when I open the front cover, a sea of messages greets me in a rainbow of ink colors. I flip the first few pages, reading some notes and bypassing others, until I jump to the inside back cover, where Edward's distinctive scrawl takes up half the cover in ink the color of blood. Words jump out at me: _love, always, heart, love, moments, memories, love._ It isn't until my eyes find the last lines that I feel as though I've been punched.

_I'll always love you, and I'll always be your best friend. I don't know which is better, but I consider myself lucky to have both. With you._

. . .

_As if a starting gun has been fired, girls flock to Edward. I can't NOT see them; they drape themselves over him in the cafeteria, in the hallways, by his car in the student lot. It's as if sharks have been circling the slowly-bleeding carcass of our relationship, just waiting for the opportunity to attack, and my losing him was apparently the green light. I park in the overflow lot, even though the student lot is never full, just so that I don't have to witness it. I can feel his eyes on me like a spotlight, but I can never decipher the look – one more modicum of proof that while I thought I knew everything about him, there's so very much I never saw. I spend hours belittling myself and hours berating him; I alternately hate him and hate that I still love him, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, I find that I'm starting to hate myself._

_Ridiculous doubts rise in me at night, as I lie beneath my comforter and watch the shadows of trees reach across my ceiling: did he ever really love me? Were there others? Have there been others since? Did he do it on purpose, so that he wouldn't have to break up with me? I try not to imagine him with Rosalie, but the imagined images of him touching her, on top of her, kissing her torture me._

_I question everything, and I've never been so completely bewildered, so utterly exhausted. And even with Alice taking up the post of my personal bodyguard-slash-best-friend, I've never felt so lonely._

. . .


	18. Puppet

A/N: Sorry I didn't get to post yesterday. I'm on vacation, so I'm going to post a few today in anticipation of not having time over the next few days.

In response to a common question: This story has a total of fifty chapters. The first twenty-four chapters are from Bella's point of view. The second half of the story is from Edward's point of view; past events are re-told from his perspective, but the present day stuff picks up where Bella leaves off.

**Thanks, as always, for reading. xo**

. . .

_**February 21, 2013 – Word Prompt: Puppet. Scenario: "A funny thing happened on the way to…"**_

. . .

The venue Carlisle and Esme have chosen for the celebration is resplendent, an arch of autumn leaves hanging over the doorway. Inside, a banquet table is set up at the front of the room with a row of cream-colored pillar candles amid a line of red, gold, and dark peach rose petals along the front edge of it; the rest of the tables have centerpieces of clustered roses in the same hues. Tealight candles are everywhere, making the room feel warm and cozy, the seats wrapped in cream slipcovers and hugged with bows of gauzy brown ribbon.

Esme is wearing a cocktail dress the color of a vanilla cupcake, and Carlisle has a chocolate brown suit with a crisp white open-necked shirt, and they look so happy and so in love, and I wonder if they're the exception to the rule.

Emmett, Jasper, and Edward are dapper and dashing in dark slacks and dress shirts in a variety of appropriate shades: Edward's is deep burgundy, Jasper's is a taupe hue, and Emmett's is the color of espresso. They look casually handsome, effortlessly beautiful.

A girl I've never seen is trying to strike up a conversation with Edward, who is swirling a small tumbler of amber-colored liquid in his fingers as he tries to avoid making eye contact.

I glance out the enormous window overlooking the gently sloping landscape, and for the first time I realize that while I always associated Edward with winter and hot chocolate and blanket forts, fall is painted with his color palette. The auburn of his hair is in the changing leaves, and the deep green of his eyes is in the evergreens that don't transform – despite my half-hearted attempt to avoid looking at him, he's inescapable.

When I spy Emmett leaning against the bar alone, I make my way over to him.

"So, I owe you congratulations," I say to his back. He turns, and the warm smile he's always given me so easily breaks over his face. "I don't think I really conveyed that appropriately the other day."

"Thanks," he replies, lifting his full drink to his lips. "Understandable." His dark eyes find his youngest brother across the room. "I'm sure it was…a surprise."

I follow his gaze to where Edward has moved and is now talking to Carlisle. "Must be weird for him." I silently berate myself for that rather spectacular admission, that rather ineloquent nosedive into the subject that has loomed large since I ran into them in the grocery store. For years, really.

"Swan, my little brother lives ten minutes from my house in Seattle, and has for the past two years. When he first moved to the city, he was at my house at least three times a week. Since Rose moved in with me six months ago, he's been over twice."

I feel immediately sad, despite a tiny, admittedly ugly hint of satisfaction. Edward has always been close with his big brother, and I know that the distance between them, regardless of the reason, must be hard for both of them. Then I see Rosalie standing with Esme beside the bar, and the thin thread of pity I'd felt for a moment vanishes altogether.

"Isn't it awkward for _you_?"

Emmett doesn't even bother to pretend not to know what I'm talking about. He watches his fiancée talking with his mother as he slowly swirls a glass of champagne in his hand. "It was, at first," he allows. "But eventually we just decided that it just…didn't matter."

I look away from Rosalie and Esme, his words unexpectedly painful. How something that left such a fault line in my life can be an event that other people deem insignificant hurts, selfish though that may be. I should be happy for Emmett, but I'm having a hard time surgically detaching the woman he's marrying from the girl who played such a key role in the betrayal that broke my young, untested heart. He shifts his weight in the space beside me. "I know," he says, correctly interpreting my look, and then raising his eyebrows as if going for a joke. "A funny thing happened on the way to adulthood." When I frown, he shrugs. "Everyone has a past, and no one gets to choose what theirs looks like. You can't go back in time and undo the things you did that you wish you hadn't. Nobody has that option. The only choice you have is how much of an impact you let the past have on your present." I realize for the first time that, perhaps because Edward was always so intellectually brilliant, no one ever gave Emmett much credit. When I say nothing, he continues, his voice gentle. "And people change when they grow up. Sometimes it's surprising how much."

It doesn't occur to me until he's crossed the room and pulled his fiancée onto the dance floor that I'm not sure whether he was talking about Rosalie or Edward. Another ugly realization hits me as I watch Rosalie laugh, feeling seventeen all over again, relegated to the sidelines: in a room of people I once knew, I might be the one who's grown the least.

. . .

_A month. It's been a month since I found out about Edward losing his virginity, and the wound is still raw to the point of anguish. According to Alice, it was a one-night stand: Edward has no interest in dating Rosalie, despite her best efforts to convince him otherwise for a whole two days afterward. This, as much as anything, makes him seem like a stranger, and I find myself unable to make the two Edwards coexist in my mind. A not-so-small part of me hopes that it's out of guilt, that he knows how hurt I was when I found out and is attempting, however unsuccessfully, to minimize the damage. But there's a terrified part of me that wonders if this is just one more indication of the fact that I never knew Edward nearly as well as I thought I did, and that he is, in fact, the type of boy who will have sex with a girl he doesn't love. _

_The hits are always unexpected, and always brutal. In the locker room, I hear second-hand details about the physical attributes of the boy I dated for two years. In the newspaper, I see headlines about the baseball team's winning record and Edward's stellar pitching. In the hallways, I read the posters listing Edward among the nominees for prom king. I try, and fail, not to care about any of it. I navigate my days with the seemingly involuntary movements of a marionette coaxed to life by a puppet master, sleepwalking through schoolwork and the sad mockery of a social life I can claim as my own, and I come to terms with the fact that a broken heart keeps beating._

. . .


	19. Cafeteria

_**February 22, 2013 – Word Prompt: Cafeteria. Dialogue Flex: "Don't say another word."**_

. . .

The clinking of silverware against a crystal glass interrupts my conversation with Charlie as a hush falls over the rest of the room, a sea of eyes trained on where Carlisle stands, one hand on the back of Esme's chair and the other holding a champagne flute. He clears his throat and gazes around at the people watching him expectantly, a faintly amused smile curling his lips upward.

"If you'll all permit me a moment of indulgence," he begins, and there are approving murmurs from the guests. "Thank you." He glances down at Esme, and his smile goes from amusement to adoration before he looks back up, glancing at his sons before facing their family friends. "Okay, this is really just…I'm still so crazy about this woman, and we wanted to celebrate that. We thank you all for going along with us." At that, he half-turns so that he's facing Esme, his hand moving from the back of her chair to her shoulder.

"Esme, my love. Thirty years ago, I had no idea what life had in store for us, but I knew that no matter what it was, it was navigable if I had you beside me. I anticipated tough times, and yes, we've had them, but here's the funny thing: I can't remember them. When I try to, there are vague recollections of moments, but nothing more. On the other hand, when I think back on the joyous moments of our life together, I can remember them with perfect clarity. I remember the look on your face on the three occasions you held each of our sons for the very first time. I remember the little moments that have made our life: your freezing cold feet when you slide into bed beside me at night, the way you squeal when you step into the shower and you get belted in the face with water because I adjusted the nozzle to accommodate my height and forgot to tilt it back down.

"I'm so in love with every single part of you: the way your cheeks get pink when you argue with me, the fierce way you love our sons, the way you laugh when you can't hold it back.

I knew life with you would be an adventure, but I never could have dreamed how beautiful it would be. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all of it. I love you so much."

I don't realize I'm crying until Carlisle bends to kiss Esme gently on the mouth and Charlie hands me the linen napkin I'd set down between our plates. When I look back up, Edward's eyes are on mine.

The guests return their focus to dessert, and I tear my gaze away from his, but for the first time in years, I can feel it on me without looking. Thirty minutes later, when I've finished my crème brulee and coffee, I spy him leaning against the bar, a glass in his hand as he talks to Jasper. As I draw near, his gaze finds me, and he watches my approach with wary eyes. Momentarily, I flash back to a high school cafeteria and that same sad, cautious green.  
"Ask me to dance." I can see the memory of the last time he asked me flash behind his eyes before he sets his glass down on the gleaming bar top.

"Please dance with me," he says, and I'm surprised by the faint trace of pleading in his voice, given that he already knows I'm going to say yes. On the dance floor, I step into the circle of his arms, trying desperately not to feel caged. "Bella, I'm so sorry—" he starts, but I cut him off with a single finger.

"Don't," I say, wanting for just the space of a song to remember. To bask in the warmth of his nearness, the familiar-yet-foreign comfort of his embrace. "Don't say another word."

And for that entire first dance, he doesn't.

. . .

_The moment I realize what a true friend Alice is is the night of the Forks junior/senior prom, when she shows up on my doorstep with the same duffel bag she always brings for sleepovers. I can see in my mind's eye the silver beaded dress she picked out for tonight, the faux-gemstone accessories, and I frown at her flannel pajama pants and her hooded sweatshirt. "Alice, what are you doing here? Why aren't you at the dance?"_

"_Because you're not at the dance," she replies simply. I shake my head and open my mouth to argue, but she grabs me, her tiny hands tight around my biceps. "Bella, you're my best friend in the world, and I know that you're hurting tonight. There's nothing at that dance that is more important to me than that."_

_I swallow the now-familiar ball of tears in the back of my throat and nod, stepping aside to permit her entry. Dumping her bag just inside the door, she turns her gaze on me. "So. What should we do?"_

_Four hours later, after viewings of _Fight Club_ and _The Truman Show –_ "Nothing with a romantic storyline," Alice had decreed – we are out of movies and out of junk food._

"_Blockbuster and Ben & Jerry's," she announces, dragging me toward the door._

_I'm just debating between Chunky Monkey and Phish Food, _The Shawshank Redemption _and _The Birdcage_ tucked beneath my arm, when the bell over the door jingles and a flurry of noise and activity tumbles through the door. When I spy Mike Newton in a tuxedo and Lauren Mallory in a gown, I feel my heart start to pound, a one-line mantra playing on repeat loop in my mind._

_Please, no. _

_Please, no._

_But then, closely behind them, a familiar head of hair, a heartbreakingly recognizable pair of eyes. Eyes that widen when he spies me, and dim when the surprise is replaced by…what? Disappointment? Guilt? Apology? His bow tie is untied, draped around his neck, the top button of his crisp white shirt undone, and the white rose pinned to his lapel is just starting to droop._

_I turn to Alice, who is already watching me with wide, knowing eyes, and shake my head. "I'm good, actually." _

"_Okay," she agrees, falling into step beside me. I don't realize until we're nearly at the door that she's walking to my right, a buffer between me and the crowd of post-prom partygoers, and I immediately feel so very, very lucky for her friendship._

"_Hi, Bella." The voice is nearly enough to make my steps falter, but I match my pace to Alice's and don't miss a step._

"_Hey," I reply without stopping, without looking, and before there's time for anything else, we're in the parking lot beneath a warm May moon. Alice loops her arm through mine, and the chill of the ice cream parlor starts to recede from my skin. _

"_I'd rather have a Snickers bar, anyway," Alice declares, bumping my hip with hers._

_I force myself to chuckle. "Me, too."_

. . .


	20. Inch

_**February 23, 2013 – Word Prompt: Inch.**_

. . .

The song shifts to another slow one, and Edward doesn't release me from the band of his arms, doesn't step back. Instead, he inches closer, eyes watching carefully for my acquiescence. I give him a small nod, and he exhales, as if in relief.

"Can I say it now?"

"Say what?" I ask, wondering if he's come up with anything besides "I'm sorry." He frowns, and I have my answer. We turn in silent circles for a few verses before I sigh into the tiny span of space between us. "Edward, here's the thing: in the grand scheme of things, if you look at it on paper, what happened between us wasn't all that dramatic. It was what it was, you were just a teenage boy and I was just a teenage girl, and our story probably isn't even all that original. And it took me a while to realize that it wasn't about what you did. It was about what that did to me." I take a deep breath and conjure up the words that have been swirling around inside me like a maelstrom since the first night I saw him in the bar and he unleashed a torrent of memory. The flood of thoughts and realizations that have come to me in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by memories and unanswered questions. "It was about the fact that you were the person I trusted more than anyone else. I trusted you implicitly, completely, with every part of me even if you didn't have all the parts of me you wanted." I can see he wants to protest that, but I keep speaking before he can interject. "When you broke my trust in you, you also broke my trust in myself. And that took a really long time for me to understand; for the longest time I just felt utterly destroyed, and I didn't understand how high school heartbreak could hurt so badly. You were the first boy I ever loved, and I thought that if that was what love felt like when it ended, I never wanted to put myself through it again. I didn't realize that the reason it hurt so badly was because it was more than that. It made me question everything about myself, too, and that was really hard to do with a broken heart. I didn't just lose you…I kind of lost me, too. And over the years, I've been really pissed at you for doing that to me. And I'm really pissed at myself for _letting_ you do that to me."

For the first time, he drops his gaze, and the tips of his ears are pink with shame. I feel a nearly-forgotten sensation rise in my belly like dough: I want to comfort him. I haven't felt that desire in so many years, and it's the first moment I feel like coming here was actually a good thing, that I'm finally actually making peace with the lingering heartache I've been carrying around, grasping like a hot coal to my own detriment.

"Edward, what happened between us cost me a lot, but not all of that is your fault. A lot of it is because of how I reacted to what happened. But until recently I haven't been able to separate your actions when you were eighteen from everything that I went through and felt afterward." I blow out a breath. "I'm working on that now. I should have worked on it before now, but…" I trail off and shrug. "I've been putting it off, apparently."

"I wish I could find words to tell you how beyond sorry I am," he says, and while I no longer know all of his looks, his expressions, I can see the complete truth in his eyes. "You're the word girl, so maybe you can help me with that. I know it doesn't help, but I want you to know that I spent a lot of time afterward questioning myself, too." He swallows. "The difference is, I never questioned you." He shakes his head. "I can't imagine how much it would hurt to think you were a stranger I'd never really known; I'm so sorry I made you feel that way about me."

I sigh, feeling something inside me loosen slightly at his words, at his validation of things I spent years feeling. "Thank you for that."

He nods, and a new sadness darkens his features. "I wish I could have been there – I wish I could have split myself in two and been the friend you needed when your jerk of a boyfriend broke your heart. I think I missed being your friend almost as much as I missed loving you." He swallows, and I battle the bubble of tears that wants to crest at his words. Because in this moment, as much as I loved my boyfriend, I realize how much I've missed my _friend_. "Bella, I know it might take time, but I really would like it if we could be friends. I've really missed you. I'd like to be able to…be in touch."

I turn this over as he turns us in a slow circle. "I think I do need some time. I know it sounds silly because it's already been years, but I do. I thought I was healing all this time, but it turns out that I wasn't. I was just pretending it didn't hurt and expecting it to fix itself. I thought time and distance were healers, but I was wrong."

"I can understand that," he says quietly.

"But I'd like it if we could get there someday, too. You have so much of my past. It's so wrapped up in us, and I feel like I've spent the past few years trying to erase that part of my life because it was too painful to think about. But I don't want that. I don't want a gaping, black hole in my back story. I just…I want to be able to remember all of the wonderful moments and not have every single one of them be painful because of the way everything ended."

He's silent for a long time, and the song changes again. This one is slightly faster, but he still doesn't release me. Finally, he heaves a sigh. "Alice and Jasper are going to get engaged."

I'm momentarily surprised, but I realize I shouldn't be: Jasper is his brother. Of course he knows. "I know," I say finally. "Alice told me."

"I'm going to be his best man." Off my surprised look, his eyes move to somewhere over my shoulder. "I…couldn't be Emmett's. We agreed years ago, before any of us even had serious girlfriends, that we'd all be best man once – I'd be Emmett's, Emmett would be Jasper's, and Jasper would be mine. But the minute he told me he was going to propose to Rosalie, I told him that I couldn't be his best man." He shakes his head. "I felt badly about that. I felt like I was letting him down but I just…I couldn't. He was angry. Said that whole thing with Rose was ancient history, and I'd better make my peace with it because she was going to be part of our family, and he was right. The problem was, it didn't feel like ancient history because I still felt so ashamed of it. I've felt ashamed of it every day, and I feel even more ashamed of it because of how it affected the people I love. Emmett, Jasper, Alice, my parents…you." It takes me a beat to realize that he's included my name on a list of people he loves. _Loves. Not loved._ "I think maybe I could move past it, for Emmett, but I can't do that knowing that it's still hurting you."

"I'm working on that," I say. Then, off the hopeful look in his eyes, I clarify. "Not for you. For me."

He nods once, and I feel small movements against my lower spine that tell me he's folded his fingers together at the small of my back. We turn in a slow circle, and neither of us says another word. For the first time in years, I have nothing left to say.

. . .

_On the night of the Forks High School graduation ceremony, I curl up in my bed and try to read, but the only thing in my brain is the realization that Edward's high school career is over, and that in less than three months, he'll be gone. Really gone, not just gone in the abstract sense that keeps me from holding his hand and kissing him and smiling at him across the lunch table. Gone, as in nowhere to be found in my little corner of the world._

_It's been a little while since I cried into my pillow, but silent tears slide from my eyes and across my temples before soaking into the purple cotton, and I let myself give in once more to the grief that has morphed from a sharp, all-consuming pain to a dull, constant ache. At some point in my pity party I drift off, and am later awoken by the sound of my name being bellowed from outside my open bedroom window. I know the owner before I make it to the other side of the room, and when I see Edward standing in a pool of moonlight, something warm and familiar spreads through my chest before the cold, harsh truth squashes it._

"_What do you want?" I hiss, wondering what time it is, wondering if Charlie's home, wondering what he's doing standing outside my window like a boy I used to know._

"_Bellllaaaaaaa," he drawls, and an ugly suspicion uncurls in my stomach. _

"_Wait there."_

_I slide flip-flops on my feet and creep down the stairs, skipping the second one from the top that creaks as I register that the house is dark. Once outside, I realize the evening is cool despite the fact that it's late June, and I wish for a brief moment that I'd thrown a sweatshirt over my tank top. Then I see Edward standing in the grass to my left, swaying slightly, and my suspicion is confirmed._

"_You're drunk," I say flatly as I descend the stairs, and the smile that he bestows upon me once I'm standing in front of him is so unguarded, so familiar it hurts. "Go home, Edward," I say, and as I turn to go back inside I see the kitchen window illuminate. The front door opens and Charlie's face appears._

"_What's going on out here?" _

"_Chief!" My father's eyes slide to Edward and narrow as his cop instincts kick in._

"_Edward, what are you doing in my yard at two o'clock in the morning?"_

"_I wanted to talk to Bella," Edward says before he looks at me again. "Beauuuuutiful Bella."_

_Instincts confirmed, Charlie sighs. "Son, have you been drinking?"_

_Edward licks his lips and attempts to school his features into something more serious; the effort is so obvious that I would likely have laughed if I weren't trying so desperately not to cry. "Yes, sir." Well, at least he's honest. To my dad, anyway._

_Charlie nods. "Do your parents know where you are?"_

"_No, sir."_

_My dad sighs again. "Wait here. Don't you leave, hear me?"_

"_Yes, sir." Charlie vanishes inside, and I turn to face Edward again. He's gazing down at me, and for a moment I'm glad he's drunk because the alcohol has apparently relieved him of his new tendency to look at me like I'm a wounded bird every time he sees me. Right now he's looking at me like he used to before he ever kissed me, affectionate and open and utterly without intention._

"_Bella," he says softly, and just when I think that maybe I'll be able to retain at least a glimpse of memory of the boy I knew, his eyes leave my face and dart to my chest, where the chill of the evening air has pebbled my skin and made my nipples visible beneath the thin cotton of my tank. I see his throat bob as he swallows, and I cross my arms over my chest._

"_What do you want?"_

"_I want to tell you I love you, even though you hate me." His words are a gut-shot, and I tighten my hold on myself as I hear the front door open once again behind me._

"_Stop it, Edward. You're drunk."_

"_Yep," he says. "But I still love you, even though I'm drunk."_

"_From what I hear, you do lots of stupid things when you're drunk."_

_I'm equal parts glad and sad when my words erase the familiar smile from his face. "Yeah," is all he says, and his lack of response fans the flames of my anger._

"_How could you?" I spit, and it's the first time I've had the spine to ask him. When it happened, we were "technically" broken up. "Technically" he could sleep with whomever he wanted. "How could you sleep with her?"_

_He's still swaying slightly, but his dilated pupils don't leave my face. "I don't know," he says after a moment._

"_I hate you," I whisper, and I can no longer stop the tears from slipping down my face as twin headlamp beams split the darkness and a purring engine pulls into the driveway._

_Pain steals across his face and he reaches out to pull me to his chest. A part of me wants to let him, yearns for the familiar comfort of his embrace, but I can't, and I pull back. "Bella," he pleads, trying forcibly to pull me in again, and I shove him back before slapping him across the face._

"_I hate you!" I say, louder this time, and his hands fall to his sides. "I'll never forgive you." He says nothing. "How could you _do_ that to me? How could you?" I'm sobbing now, and it feels good to do it in front of him, for once. "I hate you," I say again, and I can see he believes me even though I'm not sure if it's the deepest truth I have or the blackest lie._

_He tries once more to reach for me, but I shove him in the chest again before warm hands curl around my biceps from behind me, and I spot Esme hurrying across the grass to Edward, her white cotton bathrobe glowing in the harsh glare of her car's headlights. "I hate you," I say once more for good measure, but I don't know if my words were discernible amid the sobs wracking my body. The tears in his eyes are the only indication Edward heard me, and he lets his mother guide him toward the car._

"_I'm so sorry, Charlie," I hear her murmur to my father, who pulls me into his arms. This time, I go willingly._

"_I'm sorry, too," he says, and the words are a hollow echo where my ear is pressed against the t-shirt covering his chest. Years later, I would wonder why Charlie let me stand on the front grass as Esme guided her son to the passenger seat, rounded the car, climbed in, and reversed down the driveway before driving off, taillights glowing red in the night. At the time, I thought he was processing, and maybe giving me a chance to compose myself. Now, even more years later, I think he wanted that drunk boy to see the damage he'd done._

. . .


	21. Scald

**A/N: In addition to wonderful reviews, I have received some truly lovely PMs and DMs about this story. I owe a lot of people responses, but I'm still on vacation with my family. I promise I'll get to them, but in the meantime, thank you all so much for your kind words. And, as always, thank you for reading mine. xo**

. . .

_**February 25, 2013 – Word Prompt: Scald. Plot Generator – Binding Blurb: In 500 words or fewer, write a short entry about everything going wrong at once.**_

. . .

The arches and balls of my feet are aching from too many hours in heels, and I stretch my legs out in front of me, pressing the soles of my feet to the cool plaster of my bedroom wall. Pulling a cardboard box into my lap, I hear the creak of a floorboard outside my door; a beat later, a soft knock comes on the doorframe. I look up to find Charlie standing in the doorway, a steaming mug in his hand.

"Here ya go," he says, handing it to me, and I jostle it slightly as I take it, a small splash nearly scalding the skin of my thumb. "Easy," he murmurs, eyeing the box in my lap. "More sorting?"

I shrug, peering down into the box that appears to have absolutely no organization to it whatsoever.

"Sort of." When I look back up, he's still curious, so I shrug. "I was just thinking that maybe it's time I take some of my old stuff with me."

He nods. "Well, if you need a hand…" He trails off, an offer we both know I won't accept, and I nod.

"Thanks for the coffee."

Riffling through the box, I find a little bit of everything: schoolwork, photographs, magazines, stickers. About halfway through the jumble of clutter, I find a draft of a college admission essay; that I wrote it the summer before my senior year even started just goes to show how desperate I was to escape.

. . .

_Having nothing to lose can be liberating. People think it's scary, intimidating, dangerous, even, but really, it's freeing. Feeling as though there's nothing to lose makes a person fearless. It makes a person who might have spent her entire life being afraid suddenly willing to take big chances, risk big failures. _

_A few short months ago, I lost everything that's supposed to matter to a seventeen-year-old girl: I lost my best friend. I lost the boy I'd loved for years. I lost my self-esteem. I lost myself. I lost my feeling of invincibility. If I'd been writing this essay six months ago, you'd be reading something likely very similar to the thousands of other essays you're reading. Something steeped in optimism, hope, and humility. In naiveté and ignorance._

_But losing all of the currency a teenager has to offer has changed my outlook on the future; in truth, it's changed my outlook on a lot of things._

_If I don't get into your school, I'll go somewhere else._

_If I never love a boy the way I loved this one, I'll never be hurt this badly again._

_If I don't let myself get so mired down by fear, I'll spend more of my days being fearless. Daring._

_There is value to be found in the moment everything goes to hell. A person can learn a lot about herself when she hits rock bottom. Of course, my rock bottom is a relative one, a first-world, teenage-girl rock bottom characterized by social ostracism and angst-ridden solitude. Still, whether or not one is actually at rock bottom is a moot point; if one feels that she is, she may as well be._

_I once heard someone say that the best thing about rock bottom is that there's only one way to go from there: up. What I didn't voice at the time but have since spent some time thinking about is that the sentiment, while optimistic, isn't entirely true. After all, we live in a world filled with people who hit rock bottom and don't go anywhere; instead, they choose to wallow on the ground floor. They don't go farther down, but they don't claw their way back up, either. So really, at the bottom of the well, one has two options: wallow, or fight._

_My life went to shit._

_But what I'm learning about myself in the aftermath is that I want to be a fighter._

_Because rock bottom isn't the place I want to be._

**. . .**


	22. Police

**HAP-HAP-HAPPIEST OF BIRTHDAY WISHES TO HOLLETTLA, the most fabulous friend, beta, and comma goddess there is. Love ya, lady. xo**

. . .

_**February 26, 2013 – Word Prompt: Police. Dialogue Flex: "What's your excuse this time?" **_

. . .

"What's your excuse this time?" I ask in lieu of a hello when I recognize Alice's cell number on the screen of my phone.

"My excuse?" I can hear the smile in her voice, and I'd almost forgotten what that type of friendship feels like.

"Last time it was flowers and coffee."

"Last time it was wanting to _see_ your sorry ass."

"You say potato."

"I've always hated that expression."

I laugh, and it feels good, to laugh with Alice again. I'm ashamed that I can't remember the last time it happened. "Well then?"

"Coffee again?"

By the time we're in a booth at the diner once more, I'm pleasantly abuzz with the heady sensation of hovering on the precipice of reclaiming things that matter. If only one thing. Alice, true to form, wastes no time in cutting to the heart of it – or, rather, to the heart of me. "You and Edward looked awfully cozy last night," she says as she stirs a healthy splash of creamer into her coffee. I cradle my own mug in my palms, letting it warm me from the outside.

"We were just dancing."

"Uh-huh."

I look up, and Alice's shrewd gray eyes are watching me carefully. I realize, belatedly of course, that she was likely with Edward for hours after I left last night, and that she might be sitting on more recon than simply the vision of us dancing together. A sigh leaks past my lips. "Out with it."

She shakes her head. "You first."

And suddenly, I'm seventeen again, wanting to know everything and wanting to know nothing almost as badly. What is it about hometowns and old friends and childhood bedrooms that can catapult a person back in time with such totality? "We caught up. Said some things that needed saying."

"Laid some old ghosts to rest?" she presses, and the vision of Rosalie, stunning in a dress the color of deep merlot, laughing in the circle of Emmett's arms and chatting easily with Esme, flashes before my eyes.

"Tried to," I allow, and six years or no, Alice is still the master of hearing the words I don't speak.

"She's…nicer," she says, her voice purposely gentle, as if she knows the words themselves are sharp enough. "She's not like she was back then."

"A bitch, you mean?"

My friend's gray eyes are sad, and I feel seventeen once more, this time in the worst way: petulant and bitter and snappish. And I realize with a kind of suddenness that surprises me that Alice and Rose are going to be _sisters_. I'd thought I could never be more envious of Rosalie Hale, never could have hated her more than I have for the past six years, but I realize in this instant, missing my friend who's mere feet away, that I was wrong. "Sorry," I mutter into my coffee, chastened by her silence.

"You don't have to be sorry," she says, ever my gentle friend. "And Bella, you have every right to hold bad feelings toward her. But – and I think I'm telling you something you already know – Rosalie was never the one whose job it was to look after your heart."

And I've never thought about it that way, but she's right: that was Edward's job. A job he wasn't very good at, as it turns out – perhaps the first thing I've ever discovered that Edward Cullen couldn't do well.

"I don't even know why it still matters so much," I admit, and I hate the almost pleading note in my voice, as if I'm begging my one-time best friend to make sense of the disaster I've let my emotional life become.

"Really?" she asks, and when I look into her face, she looks genuinely surprised.

"It's been six years."

"So?"

I frown. I was expecting more of the "get over it" Alice from before, but she seems sincerely taken aback at my admission. "I just…tons of people get their hearts broken in high school, and they move on. It's like I'm short-circuited somewhere."

She laughs gently. "Bella, you're not short-circuited. There's nothing wrong with your wiring." When I say nothing, she takes a slow sip from her mug before setting it down gently on the Formica tabletop. "It matters because he was your friend first. Your best friend." When I open my mouth to protest, she shakes her head with that same gentle smile in place. "It's okay. I was your best _girl_friend. I know that. But he was your best friend. Your soul friend. And when he did what he did, he took more than just your boyfriend away from you." And this is why we were always friends: because Alice gets me as well as I get myself, if not better.

I nod. "That's sort of what I've been realizing."

She mirrors my nod. "Good." Finally, she gives me her end. "I haven't seen him the way he was last night in a long time."

"Like what?"

Her familiar face scrunches up into the same expression I remember from the hours we spent studying together, trying to work something out in her head. "Like…peaceful. I mean, it's not like he was ecstatic or as happy as I thought he'd be at finally getting his hands on you again. But he seemed…relieved. Like someone who was expecting something to hurt really badly and it didn't."

I ask her a question that isn't really even meant for her. "Do you think we'll ever be friends again?"

She eyes me carefully, and I wonder what she's seeing, what she's picking apart in her assessment. "I think it's worth a shot. Because, for what it's worth, I think what he learned from hurting you the way he did is a lesson he only needed to learn once. So I think, if you guys were to become friends again, there's no way he'd risk your friendship by doing something that stupid again." While I'm turning this over in my mind, she reaches across the table and covers my hand with hers. "And Bella, I can't imagine there's anything in the world he'd want more. But really, what matters is what _you_ want."

Suddenly, I'm surprised by the sting of tears behind my eyes. "Yeah," is all I can say, and if she notices the thickness in my voice, Alice doesn't acknowledge it.

. . .

_My senior year of high school arrives, and it feels like I'm in someone else's life. Edward is gone, Rosalie is gone, that entire class of people is gone, and as I move through the familiar hallways, they feel oddly empty, considering the student body is the same size it always has been. Nobody speaks of them, and it seems bizarre that such a buoyant and all-consuming group of people can suddenly be so completely absent; it must always be like this when a class graduates, but I've never cared enough in the past to notice. A part of me thinks I should be grateful, but all it does is make me feel as though I've been torn apart by a dream, as if everything that was so concrete was, in fact, a mirage. There are no green eyes trying to catch mine in Trig, no sad half-smiles as we pass in the hallways, no intent gazes from across the cafeteria. He's gone, well and truly, and it leaves me feeling as if I'm being haunted by my own imagination._

_In October, the Homecoming dance looms large in the near future, and Jacob Black asks me to be his date. I say yes, because saying no has already cost me too much. I say yes a lot over the course of the school year: to parties, to extracurricular activities, to more parties. When one of Charlie's deputies drives me home in his police cruiser near the end of April, I realize that I may have pushed it a bit too far. And yet, despite all of the times I say yes, there's still a fortress of "no" around my heart._

_There's a voice in the back of my mind telling me that I got burned by the one high school boy I never would have expected it from and that to willingly place my heart in the hands of another would be foolish. I make a not-entirely-conscious decision to wait: surely the boys of colleges are calmer, less hormonal, less reckless. I wall myself off, get through it, repeating to myself that love can wait._

_Love _would _have waited. _

_It didn't, so I will. I'll wait for it to be worth it._

**. . .**


	23. Pillow, Billow, Willow

**A/N: Sorry for the lack of post yesterday; I was on the road for over twelve hours with a three-month-old and a three-year-old, and by the time we pulled into our driveway last night, they were both screaming. Thank the gods for HollettLA's cupcakes; they were the only thing that got MisterChick and me through it. (They also make a damn good breakfast.)**

**Anyway…apologies. Two chapters today to make up for it. Happy Easter to those who celebrate! xo**

. . .

_**February 27, 2013 – Word Prompts: Pillow, Billow, Willow.**_

. . .

When I wake the next morning, the gauzy sheers at the window are billowing in the crisp autumn breeze, the top of my comforter chilled despite the warm cocoon beneath it. I stretch my legs, which still ache from standing in uncomfortable shoes, and rub my eyes before glancing at the clock on my nightstand. I told Charlie I wanted to be on the road by ten; I have two hours to shower, get dressed, toss my stuff back in my bag, and hit the road. Plenty of time.

I shift, and the pull of my t-shirt against the small of my back brings with it the memory of Edward's hands at that same place, the warmth of his touch seeping through the thick wool of my dress. At the time, despite my desire for closure, for peace, I had steeled myself against his affecting presence, but now, in the safety of my childhood bedroom, I allow the details to take hold.

He's taller, despite the fact that he was pretty sure that by the time he was eighteen, he was done growing. His shoulders are broader – one of the first things I noticed when I hesitantly placed my hands atop them – but his waist is still narrow. His hair is shorter, though still disorderly, and he was wearing cologne – something I've never smelled on him before. He was so very much the boy I loved but somehow entirely different, and it isn't until now, mulling over the changes beneath my beloved comforter, my cheek pressed into my familiar lavender pillow, that I realize what it is: he's a man. The boy I loved became a man, and I missed it.

And I wonder, as I roll to one side, my toes hitting the wooden boards at the foot of my bed, if there are changes in me that have similarly surprised him.

. . .

_The outlines of cardboard boxes are just visible through the darkness, suitcases with all of the clothes I still wear standing by my bedroom door, the heavy, bowed branches of the willow tree brushing whispers against my windowpane. I lie in the bed I've known since childhood, soaking up the familiar feeling of home, of my room, before sunlight comes and ushers me into the next phase of my life. Despite my intentions, my brain replays oft-battled memories of moments in this room: the soft ping of an acorn at the window, the warm feel of a boy's soft mouth against mine. For once, I let myself wallow in them, bidding them farewell as I say goodbye to my childhood, my bedroom, my past. _

_And, for what I promise myself will be the last time, I say goodbye to Edward Cullen._

. . .


	24. Company

_**February 28, 2013 – Word Prompt: Company. Audio-Visual Challenge – Musical Mastery: "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" by The Beatles**_

. . .

"Got company, Bells," Charlie says from near the kitchen window, as I loop the strap of my purse onto my shoulder. "I'll say goodbye in here, if you want." His dark eyes are concerned, knowing, and I nod my reassurance.

"Okay." I hug him and say goodbye before stepping out onto the porch and making my way down the steps and toward where Edward is leaning against the driver's side door of my packed car. As I approach, he straightens and holds a cylinder-shaped cluster of purple tissue paper toward me, tied at each end with white ribbon so that its shape resembles a Tootsie Roll.

"What's this?" I ask as I accept the parcel.

"It's where we started," he says, and I pull the tissue paper off to find a can of Ghirardelli powdered hot chocolate mix. "Bella, I'll always love you in a hundred different ways, but this was the first way, and even if we can't save any of the others, I have to hope we can at least save this one."

I'm staring at the canister, but I can't see the lettering through the haze of tears making my vision blur. I nod at my hands and blink furiously, trying to clear my eyes, but I can tell from his expression that when I look up, evidence of my reaction is still there. "Thank you," I say, clutching the can in a white-knuckled grip.

"You're welcome," he says, and I hesitate for a moment before I step forward and timidly wrap my arms around his shoulders. He freezes for a split second before his arms band around my waist so tightly that it's a struggle to breathe. His arms are steel but the rest of him melts like butter into our hug, and I close my eyes as his scent hits me: so familiar, but not the same. The same soap. A different shampoo. Old and new combining to create something changed but recognizable. I force myself to pull back, and I don't miss his momentary hesitation to let me go, the brief moment between when I let go and when he does that is evidence of how things can change.

"It was good to see you," I say, and I'm surprised at how easy the words are to say, how true they taste as they leave my lips.

"Really?" He's as surprised as I am, and a small smile pulls at my mouth.

"Really," I say with a small nod.

"I'm glad," he says, and the truth of his words is evident in the relief that softens his face.

"I need to get going," I say, cocking my head toward my car.

He nods, stepping back. "Drive safely." He swallows and looks almost sad. "Take care of yourself."

I nod. "You too," I say, relieved to realize that I mean it. I want good things for Edward, and maybe someday I'll be okay with the likelihood that they won't include me.

As I drive away, turning the volume knob up as the familiar guitar chords of a Beatles song bleed from the speakers, the boy, the house, the street, the town growing ever smaller in the rearview mirror, I feel one tiny piece of me begin to stitch itself back together. When I pull onto the highway and head south and "this bird has flown" echoes in my ears, I realize that I really believe Edward might be right: maybe we can save that one part of us, of what we had. And maybe someday, when my heart is done stitching the rest of itself back together, it will be enough.

. . .

**A/N: That's the end of the BPOV; tomorrow, EPOV begins. As I mentioned, the present will pick up where Bella leaves off, while the past will be retold from Edward's perspective. Thanks so much for reading, and for all of your lovely words. xo**


	25. Slander

**A/N: Thanks, as always, for being awesome. And thanks, as ever, to HollettLA, the very definition of the word. xo**

. . .

**EPOV**

. . .

_**March 1, 2013 – Word Prompt: Slander. Plot Generator—Phrase Catch: The coast is clear.**_

. . .

My mind is a whirlwind of legalese, my media law text open in front of me, its words swimming before my eyes. If someone were to ask now what made me opt to pursue a law degree in this field, I'd have a hard time coming up with an answer. I don't really care about privacy and censorship, nor do I lose much sleep over freedom of information or libel and slander. The only arm of my degree that holds some measure of interest for me is intellectual property and copyrights, and that's only really because the idea of someone trying to steal another person's work doesn't sit right with me.

When my phone chimes, I welcome the interruption.

"Tell me you're not studying on a Saturday night." It's Emmett.

"I'm not studying on a Saturday night," I echo in monotone, even as I push my thumb and forefinger into my aching eyes.

"Nerd."

"Aren't older siblings supposed to encourage responsibility in their younger ones?"

"Beats the hell outta me. Listen, the coast is clear: Rose is getting her nails done with her girlfriends. Wings and beer and football in half an hour."

Wings and beer and football aren't really my things. But my brother is one of my things, and the opportunities I have to spend with him and him alone are growing fewer and farther between as the looming reality of his marriage grows. "Okay," I say, and when he doesn't reply, I wonder idly if I've dropped the call. "Em?"

"That's it?"

"What?"

"I had a whole, like, argument planned."

"I'm crushed to be missing it," I say, closing my book and pushing it toward the back of my desk. "Who are they playing today?" Despite having graduated from USC and leaving his football career behind six years ago, he never tires of informing anyone who will listen that Trojan football is something that gets in a man's blood. Sort of like the mob: once you're in, it's for life.

"Notre Dame. We're gonna pulverize 'em."

I chuckle, leaning back in my chair and eyeballing my as-yet-unpacked suitcase sitting atop the trunk at the foot of my bed. "Okay. Willie's?"

"Yep. Pick you up?"

"Sure. Thanks." As I hang up, I gaze at my open luggage for another beat before scrolling through my phone to the number Jasper had given me "in good confidence" before we parted ways back in Forks.

_Time_, she had said, and despite the nearly overpowering urge to make the call, I know I won't. The default silhouette of a gray man sitting beside her name makes her seem like the most ominous sort of stranger, and it makes me sad in a way that seems ridiculous and far too apt, all at the same time.

_Tenacious_, one of my undergrad professors had called me, implying that it was a personality trait that would serve me well in a law career. It's the part of me that wants to doggedly pursue her forgiveness, her friendship, her trust with utter relentlessness until I have it again.

But I won't. I lost her once because I wasn't patient with her.

It's a mistake I won't make again.

. . .


	26. Document

**A/N: I feel the need to address a question that has been posed by a few reviewers: yes, the past segments of the EPOV chapters will revisit the events that took place between Edward and Rosalie. There will not be graphically detailed description, but the events do reappear in later chapters. If that's not something you feel prepared to read, this is your heads-up. **

**Thanks for reading. xo**

_. . ._

_**March 2, 2013 – Word Prompt: Document.**_

. . .

A month. It's been nearly a month since I said goodbye to Bella back in Forks, a month since she hugged me, since the smell of her invaded my nose and the feel of her pressed up against me assaulted my sensory memory with the subtlety of an express train. All of the trees save the evergreens are bare, the stores are alive with holiday music and Christmas decorations, and the ambiguity of her request for time is driving me mad. It's hard to understand, given the fact that it's been six years since we had any kind of role in each other's lives, but it's as if the mere prospect of being her friend again has ignited in me a spark of possibility that I can't seem to extinguish.

It occurs to me that I could have sent her a Christmas card, but the holiday is three days away and there's no chance a card is going to make it from Seattle to San Francisco in three days, especially not at this time of year.

I'm willing to admit to being disappointed that my parents have opted to spend my father's Christmas vacation on a second honeymoon in Italy in lieu of hosting the annual Cullen Family Christmas: a Hollywood-worthy week of festivities, in which my mother buys us all new flannel pajamas and the five of us bundle into the car on Christmas Eve to drive around and look at Christmas lights and every night comes complete with steaming mugs of hot chocolate and a different holiday movie. My mother saves our birth year Christmas ornaments until we arrive so that we can put them on her otherwise already decorated tree, and my father gets a thrill out of sending my brothers and me out in turns to retrieve firewood from the pile at the back corner of the lot. On Christmas morning, my mother documents the opening of gifts with a top-of-the-line digital SLR camera, taking frame after frame of photos that will wind up printed and in an album by the second week of January. In short, my parents spend the holiday season channeling Martha Stewart and Clark Griswold. I don't have the heart to tell my mom that I sleep in my boxers these days and that I haven't been able to sip hot chocolate without tasting guilt in years. There have only been two women in my life that I could never bear to disappoint, and my mother's one of them. The fact that I more than disappointed the other only makes me more desperate not to fail the one who still thinks I'm worth loving.

. . .

_I can't put my finger on what's different. She's the same girl I've known since I was a toddler, the same girl who's thrown snowballs and climbed trees and played board games and watched movies with me. But it's as if watching her step across the threshold of Forks High has changed everything, and I can't stop seeing her in ways I've never thought to see her before. I never really noticed the small spray of pale freckles across the bridge of her nose, or how small her hands are. And, for the first time in my life, when I see her smile, I can't stop my brain from wondering what her lips taste like._

_I stir the hot chocolate gently, watching as the powder dissolves slowly into the milk, muddying it and turning it into something entirely different. I can feel her beside me, watching, and she's been next to me a million times for a million years, and why am I suddenly so _aware_ of her? It's as if she's a ball of static electricity and the tiny hairs on my arms and the back of my neck are all standing on end, straining toward her; idly, I wonder: if we touched, would I feel a spark?_

_When steam starts to curl over the cocoa, I retrieve two mugs from the cupboard to the left of the stove; when I've filled them, I reach for the can of whipped cream near my elbow and squirt a blob on the top of each one. Bella reaches a small hand out for the mug nearest to her – an American Medical Association mug – and it's only now that I realize the other one is a cheesy souvenir mug that my dad bought for my mom one Valentine's Day. _Someone in Forks, WA loves me.

"_Nope," I say quickly, reaching out for the navy blue AMA mug. "That one's mine."_

_Confusion flickers across her features as she hands it to me; in return, I hand her the mug with the big red heart on it._

_For the first time in my life, I don't have the courage to meet her eye._

. . .


	27. Disgust

**A/N: Just to reiterate, the dates at the top of the chapters are the dates of the writing prompts; they have nothing to do with the chronology of the story. Thanks, as always, for reading! xo**

. . .

_**March 3, 2013 (Reflection Day)**_

_**March 4, 2013 – Word Prompt: Disgust. Dialogue Flex: "Better get a move on!"**_

. . .

"Merry Christmas, bro!" Emmett booms, swinging the front door of his home wide open and grabbing me by the shoulders in a hug that suggests he could easily crush my ribs, given the urge.

"Merry Christmas, Em." Rosalie appears behind him, watching me with those cool blue eyes. "Merry Christmas, Rosalie."

"You too," she replies, stepping toward me hesitantly. Give her credit, Rose tends to give me a wide berth, but evidently on Christmas, a hug is a requirement.

Here's the thing about Rosalie: she's not a terrible person. In hindsight, of course, she wasn't the nicest high schooler. But in the years since, she's mellowed into a pretty decent girl, and she makes my brother ridiculously happy, which counts for something in my book. I feel mildly guilty for the fact that I can't let bygones be, and that I avoid her presence as completely as possible, but guilt is hardly a new emotion for me.

I step inside their townhouse and am immediately enveloped by Jasper, whose hug is slightly less crushing than Emmett's. Then comes Alice, who hugs me gently.

Alice's presence: another subtle form of torture. Where Rosalie is content to play the same game I am and pretend it never happened, Alice as a constant is like the spotlight that can't stop swinging toward the elephant in the corner. "Merry Christmas, Edward," she says now, giving me a polite hug.

"You too, Alice," I say, hugging her back, trying not to let my body go rigid with unease, trying to inject as much friendliness into it as possible despite my discomfort. It's as if, after all this time, I'm hoping she'll go running back to Bella and go to bat for me: tell her I'm not awful, that I'm worth knowing, that she wasn't wrong to love me once upon a time. The subtle distance she keeps from Rosalie as we make our way inside suggests that, unlike Rosalie and me, she is less willing to pretend.

We melt into the warmth of the house, the Christmas carols coming from the living room speakers, the fire burning in the hearth, the small but tasteful Christmas tree in the corner of the room with the respectable mound of gifts beneath it. The majority are wrapped in elegant red-and-green-plaid paper, and I know without looking at tags that they're from our parents.

Just as Rosalie and Emmett are arranging platters of appetizers on their tiny coffee table, Alice's phone rings, and I don't think anything of it until her eyes flick once from Jasper to me before she stands and excuses herself from the room, and I know. I know it's Bella. I let her disappear for a good five minutes before following under the guise of getting more eggnog. When I step into the small kitchen that smells of turkey and stuffing and gravy, I hear only the tail end of Alice's last comment.

"I'm so glad you called," she says, and it never occurred to me until now that in hurting Bella, I hurt Alice, too. Because Alice fell in love with Jasper, and Jasper's my brother, and Alice is going to be my sister, and Bella doesn't want anything to do with me or my family, and is there no end to the ways in which I can hurt the same girl? Is there no limit to the collateral damage a stupid, reckless eighteen-year-old kid can cause?

I'm lost in my silent but not unfamiliar self-disgust when Alice turns, spying me hovering on the threshold like an eavesdropper. I feel faintly ashamed: again, not a new emotion where Alice is concerned. But there's something new in her eyes, something softer, and when she speaks again, I feel something in my heart flicker. "Do you want to say hello to Edward?" She's watching me intently, and I place my empty glass on the counter, rubbing my hands nervously over the thighs of my slacks. "Yeah, he's right here."

_God, please, don't let her say no. _I realize, if she does, that this will be it. Confirmation that what I broke can never be fixed, despite our talk at Thanksgiving. If she can't bring herself to talk to me at Christmas, there's no friendship left to save.

Just as I'm managing to slide down the familiar slope of depression, Alice holds her phone out to me, a tentative smile on her lips. "Bella," she says, as if I didn't know.

I lift the phone to my ear. "Bella?"

"Hi, Edward." And I don't care what's wrapped beneath that Christmas tree; in this moment, I don't need anything more.

"Hi," I say softly, leaning against the countertop, all too aware of the fact that the voices in the next room have dropped. "Merry Christmas."

"Thanks," she replies. "You too."

"Are you in Forks?"

"Yeah. Just making dinner."

"Just you and Charlie?"

"No, a couple of my dad's friends from the res are here, too."

"Nice," I say, even as I remember the swell of jealousy that crashed over me when I would hear about Bella's life after I left Forks: going to the homecoming dance with Jacob Black; being brought home from a party on the reservation by one of Charlie's deputies. All of the things I missed; all of the things I likely caused, even if only indirectly. I realize that for all the unspoken words that still lie between us, I have no idea what to say to Bella in this moment. Just as I'm opening my mouth to say something else innocuous, Alice's voice rings out from the living room.

"Better get a move on! Your brothers are eating all of the mini quiches!" Ever the bodyguard, even from a different room, even from a distance of miles.

"I'm sorry," Bella says quickly, and I try not to read relief in her tone. "I'm intruding on your holiday with your family. I'll let you go."

"Wait!" I very nearly yelp, instantly desperate at the thought that she might hang up and sever the tie once again. "Wait," I say again, softer this time. "Can I…this was really great. Talking, I mean. Can I call you again? To catch up? Maybe when there isn't a bunch of my crazy family around?"

There's a pause, and I plead silently as I stare at the cream-colored wallpaper in my brother's kitchen. _Please. Say yes._ It doesn't escape me that I spent years as a teenager making the same plea for something else entirely, and that in the end, it ruined everything.

"Okay," she says finally. "That would be okay, I guess."

I blow out a breath. "Great."

"I, um…should I give you my number?"

Busted. "I, uh, actually already have it. Jasper gave it to me."

"Oh." I can hear the frown in her voice, the dangling possibility of regret that she's letting me in and I've already overstepped. But then, after a minute: "Okay then."

It's small. Insignificant. A tiny, microscopic, miniscule seed of trust. But in the grand scheme of things, it feels a whole lot like a Christmas miracle.

. . .

"_Any cute boys in your class?" I hear my mother ask as I make my way across the living room, eyes still heavy with sleep._

"_No." It's Bella's voice, and I stop in my tracks._

"_I remember," my mother continues. "There's always a period where the girls are all beautiful young women and the boys are all…well. Boys."_

_Beautiful young women. So my mother has already noticed what I'm slowly realizing: that the girl with the knobby knees and wild hair is someone altogether different these days. I school my features, force myself to be the Edward of always as I step into the kitchen. When I finally look at Bella, she has a smear of whipped cream on the end of her nose, and before I realize it, I'm swiping the pad of my thumb across her nose. I wait for her to wrinkle her nose in disgust; when she blushes, I feel something in me spark. I've never seen her do that before._

_In the shower, the hot water cascades around me, warming me from the outside, steam swirling around me in the shower stall, soap suds sliding down over my chest. Bella is here, in my house, chatting with my mother, and there's nothing unusual about any of it except what it does to me. Because never, not once in all my years of knowing her, have I cared whether she was here or not beyond the fact that it meant I had someone to hang out with._

_But now, suddenly, inexplicably, I care. And in the steamy seclusion of my shower, I make a decision. Bella's been following my lead for years: I've always been the first to climb to the higher branch, tightrope-walk along the narrow beam, jump off the higher diving board. I've always been the one testing the waters, making sure they're safe for her to follow me in._

_An hour later, I coax her to follow me once again; when I press my lips to hers, I'm flying higher, falling faster than I ever did off any diving board._

"_Why did you do that?" she whispers, and I tell her the truth, always._

"_Because I've wanted to for ages."_

. . .


	28. Skilled

_**March 5, 2013 – Word Prompt: Skilled. Plot Generator—Idea Completion: Twisting the truth.**_

. . .

"Happy New Year, Bella," I say into the mouthpiece of my phone, my heart hammering an unfollowable beat in my chest. Voice mail. Couldn't answer or didn't want to? Almost ten o'clock, which means she's probably at some loud party somewhere. Maybe with a date. Try not to imagine her kissing someone at midnight and fail, because who wouldn't want to kiss her? "I just, uh, wanted to wish you the best for the coming year." I wince, sound like a greeting card. A clichéd one, at that. "I, uh, hope you had a great Christmas." And I'm stumped again. "It was nice talking to you then." A slight twist of the truth: talking to her was a lot of things – intimidating, exhilarating, slightly awkward – but "nice" doesn't even factor in.

What else is there to blurt into the ghostly silence of her inbox?

_Give me a call?_ Asking too much, maybe.

_Sorry I missed you?_ Too much potential to be read as an ending.

_I'll try you again? _Stalkerish.

"I hope to talk to you again soon," I settle on finally, dropping my phone on the couch cushion beside me as I watch the people in Times Square get progressively drunker as the crowd thins, the ball having dropped nearly an hour ago.

A blond with a microphone is making laps, asking stragglers about their New Year's resolutions, and at no other point in the year is the human race so skilled in the art of self-delusion. I already know that woman #1 isn't going to go to the gym every day, woman #2 isn't going to meet the love of her life, woman #3 isn't going to save money for her dream vacation.

"And you at home," the blond says now, staring straight into the lens. "What are _your_ promises to yourself for the coming year?"

The same as always: to deserve what I'll never have.

. . .

_People watch us now, and I notice Bella noticing. I kiss her against her locker, but after the first time I try to slide my tongue into her mouth and she pulls back so quickly she bangs her head against the metal door behind her, I keep it chaste. Remind myself that she's younger, she's a sophomore, she's modest and borderline shy._

_But I don't care about any of them, because she's mine. And though neither of us is particularly skilled in the art of seduction, her kisses are real and honest and gentle and Bella._

_She pulls away from my lips, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth as her dark eyes flick around the hallway, cataloguing who's been watching her suck face with her boyfriend. I bury my face in her neck because I don't give a shit – let them watch. I can smell the mixture of things that make up "Bella," and I'd never say it aloud because it's girly and stupid and embarrassing, but if I could bottle that smell up and keep it on me, I would. I kiss the soft skin at the side of her neck once, absently, without really thinking about it, and at her soft, surprised gasp, I harden. _

_I pull my hips away immediately; God knows she isn't ready to have the evidence of how badly I want her pressed against her in the middle of the hallway. Or anywhere, for that matter. But I can't help wondering, if we were somewhere else, somewhere without prying eyes, when she might be._

. . .


	29. Boss, Loss, Cross

**A/N: I may or may not be traveling tomorrow, so I'm going to post two chapters today, just in case I am. If I'm not…well, bonus chapter. Happy Friday! xo**

. . .

_**March 6, 2013 – Word Prompts: Boss, loss, cross.**_

. . .

"Hi, Edward, it's Bella."

The voice, the sound of that voice saying my name, makes it seem as though the ground is shifting beneath my feet. "Bella," I echo, trying to find my bearings.

"Bella Swan."

As if I didn't know, wouldn't know her voice anywhere, even after all this time – as if there could ever be _another_ Bella – and a surprised half-laugh falls from my lips before I can grab it back in. "Bella, I'd have known it was you even if you hadn't said your name. I don't need a surname for clarification."

"Oh," she says, and I can picture her blushing on the other end of the phone with a clarity that surprises me. "Okay. Well, um. I got your message. On New Year's. I just…wanted to return your call."

"I'm really glad you did," I say, crossing the room to turn down the volume on my music dock. "How are you? Did you have a good New Year's?"

"It was okay," she replies, voice wary, and once again, I try not to imagine her pressed up against someone when the clock struck twelve. "My friend's boss had a party."

"Cool," I say, wincing immediately.

"Did you have a good holiday? With your family?"

It's funny – I remember opening gifts, a sea of festive wrapping paper, Emmett belting out Elvis' "Blue Christmas" after way too much eggnog, but it's all hazy; the only crystal-clear memory from the day is the way my heart had galloped in my chest when I heard her voice on the phone. Didn't even care that it was polite small talk, because it was polite small talk with _Bella._ "Yeah," I say. "It was…nice. How was yours?"

"Good, thanks," she says. "Nice to visit home."

"Yeah," I say, memories of Forks sliding through my mind like snapshots. Unsurprisingly, all of them contain Bella. Heartbreakingly, too many of them were snapped after I lost her.

"Well, anyway," she says, after a few moments of awkward silence. "I just wanted to return your call."

"Hey, Bella?"

"Yeah?"

"I really meant what I said. In Forks. About…being friends again. I'd really like it if we could do that."

She's silent, and I wonder if, once again, I've pushed her too far. But then: "We live twelve hours away from each other."

"Like this," I blurt. "Just…phone calls. Talking. That's it. It doesn't have to be anything more." The same promise, the same reassurance I gave her years ago, but this time, I'm determined to keep it. Determined to make her see that, despite the mistakes I made when I was eighteen, whatever little bit Bella is willing to give me now is enough.

"Okay," she says finally. "Maybe…maybe we can start by just…getting to know each other again." There's a short pause, and when she speaks again, there's that new hardness creeping back into her voice that wasn't there when she loved me. "I'm different now. So…you'll have to get to know this me."

"I'm different now, too," I reply, and while she said the words like an apology, like a disclaimer, I say them like a promise.

. . .

_Bella looks like the ocean at midnight in her shimmery dress, and I can't stop sneaking peeks at the expanse of skin above the neckline of her dress: shoulders and shoulder blades and collarbones and that little "v" at the base of her throat and the tiniest, barest suggestion of cleavage. It's more skin than I've seen Bella show since we were kids in swimsuits, and it's torturing me. As we press our bodies together to the slow songs, I have to pull away more than once to keep it a secret, the effect she's having on me._

_When we pull into the driveway, Chief Swan's cruiser is missing from its usual spot. When she invites me inside, I have to silently tell myself that it doesn't mean what it sounds like, what parts of me so desperately wish it meant. This is Bella – she doesn't even realize how sexy she is, what she does to me._

"_I love you," I tell her, not for the first time, as we lie with ankles woven together atop her bedspread, her dark hair pooled around her pillow, but it's the first time I've been on her bed since we used to bounce on it, and even if she's not ready for me to show her, I have to tell her. _

"_I love you, too," she says, whispers, as if she's slipping me a secret, like she's Cinderella and we're part of a spell that could be broken. I kiss her, feeling my heart race and my body prickle with heat as my lips find her mouth, neck, earlobe. My name falling from her lips pushes me even higher, and my hands find the zipper of her dress and drag it down. She tenses, and even through my haze of want, I pull back, looking into her beautiful, trusting eyes, the loss of her mouth on mine almost painful._

Take care of her. _It's been my promise to myself, always, but it means something so different now._

"_It's okay," I promise her. "I just want to touch your skin. I won't go anywhere."_

_But God, I want to. I want to go everywhere. With her._

. . .


	30. Magazine

**A/N: Thanks for your lovely words. xo**

. . .

_**March 7, 2013 – Word Prompt: Magazine. Audio-visual Challenge—Imagined Image: Spirale Infernale.**_

. . .

"What are you doing?" I ask, pushing my textbook away from me, phone cradled between my shoulder and jaw as I lean back into my sofa and pull throw cushions out from behind me to toss them to the floor.

"Working on a freelance piece for a local travel magazine," she replies, and I hear something that sounds like a laptop being closed. Her undivided attention is a small thrill. "What are you doing?"

"Just studying."

"Right. Alice mentioned you were in law school." I wonder absently what else Alice and Bella talk about when they talk about me. I'm ashamed just trying to imagine it, and I have a sudden flash to the way Alice – tiny, elfin, fine-boned Alice – would bodily put herself between me and Bella anytime our paths crossed after I lost her. How, at Christmas, she didn't laugh at anything Rosalie said, her tiny mouth pinching together instead in a tight mockery of a smile. "Do you like it?"

"Yeah. It's a lot of work, but I like it. It's interesting."

"That's good. Media law?"

"Yeah," I reply. And perhaps for the first time, I identify my career aspiration for what it is: the most roundabout possible way to protect her when it was no longer my job to do it any other way.

The conversation feels like a spiral staircase, a steady climb of chitchat leading to a destination I can't see from the bottom. And just like when I was eighteen, I fight the urge to push her for more. The stilted, awkward talk of strangers is maddening in its plodding pace, and I don't know what it is about this girl that makes me feel the urge to push, but I can only think that it's because, when it comes to Bella, I've always wanted everything.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Okay." The wariness is back, and I curse it. Curse myself for putting it there, then and now.

"Is there more that you want to say? I mean…are there more things you want to…clear up? I'm not totally sure of…where we are."

I hear her blow out a breath. "Me either." It sounds like she's sharing a confidence, and for the first time in six years, I feel like Bella and I are a team. Maybe we can be lost together in the mess I made. "I guess…if there's stuff to say, we should say it so that we can maybe move forward. But I don't think we need to rehash everything just for the sake of it."

"Okay."

After a beat: "Was there…something you wanted to clear up?"

I'm opening my mouth to say no, but the word catches in my throat. There's a _lot_ I want to clear up, but I don't know where to begin. "There's a song I can't get out of my head," I admit, surprising even myself; I wasn't sure I would ever have the courage for this particular revelation.

"Oh?" Back to wary, mixed with a little bit curious.

"Are you familiar with Great Big Sea?"

"Is that the name of the song?"

I chuckle, despite my anxiety. "So that's a no. Great Big Sea is the band. It's sort of a folk-rock band that sings folk songs and sea shanties."

"Wow. That's…specific."

"They're actually really good," I say, and I hear her laugh. Something in my chest loosens at the sound.

"Okay." But her doubt is clear in her tone.

"Anyway. They have this song. And ever since November, it's been sort of niggling at my brain." I don't tell her that I've been playing it on near-repeat loop in my car for the past two months.

"Okay." I had forgotten, in the years between now and then, the way Bella would unknowingly employ some of her father's cop tactics. Never giving any indication of what she was thinking, always waiting it out like the most seasoned detective. Lost in my silent reverie, I don't realize I've dropped the thread of conversation until Bella finally presses. "What's it called?"

"Huh?"

"The song. What's it called?"

"'How Did We Get From Saying I Love You,'" I say, the last three words and their implication making a chasm open in my chest, a void filled with insecurity and anxiety and apprehension and all of the things that have been my typical downward spiral whenever I think of the girl I hurt so spectacularly all those years ago.

"Hm," is all she says, and not for the first time, I wish her dad had been a dentist or an electrician or pretty much anything where interrogation wasn't a regular part of his job.

When it becomes clear she's not going to give me anything more, I hurry to elaborate. "It starts out with these two people who meet on a street corner and start talking about the weather and making small talk, and the guy starts ruminating over the fact that he can't really figure out how they went from saying 'I love you' to 'I'll see you around someday.'"

She's silent for a few moments before I hear her soft exhalation. "That's…really sad."

"Yeah," is all I can find by way of a reply, and we sit in silence for the space of a few breaths before I finally pluck up the courage to ask the question that's been turning over in my mind for months, and, if I'm being honest with myself, years. "Hey, Bella? Can I ask you something else?"

"Okay," she says haltingly, and I will myself not to be deterred by the obvious hesitation.

"If you could go back. If you could go back and…not love me. If you could change it all and just stay my friend, not ever be my girlfriend. If you could make it so that I never kissed you…would you?"

The silence on the other end of the phone is so absolute that the buzz of the wireless connection becomes audible, equal parts comforting and nerve-racking. It's the only confirmation I have that she hasn't hung up on me, that she's still there. Not for the first time, I wish we were having these conversations face-to-face.

I know how I want her to answer, and I hate that it makes me feel even more selfish than I already am when it comes to Bella. I know I hurt her; I know I fucked it up about as badly as I possibly could have, but to hear that she'd prefer none of it had ever happened would crush me, erase all of the happy thoughts I still have of the days when she was mine. The fact that every single one of those happy thoughts is tempered by the reality of how I destroyed us is a weight I'm willing to shoulder as penance, as long as the memories can stay mine.

Finally, when I've reached the point where I'm about to speak, to let her off the hook, to attempt to translate her non-answer into something comprehensible, her voice comes over the line in a soft whisper.

"No."

"No?" I ask, a nearly foreign flare of hope firing through my chest, lighting wishes that have no business being lit. She's quiet again, and I force myself to be patient.

"No," she says again, finally, a little stronger this time, and I can't quite curb my surprise.

"Really?" I cringe at the pathetic hope in my own voice, praying that she isn't reading more into it than the simple truth of the fact that I'm relieved nearly to the point of tears that she doesn't regret me enough to wish it all away.

"Yeah," she says finally, softly. "I mean, obviously I wish that things could have happened differently. If I could change anything, I'd change…that."

"Me too," I nearly whisper.

"But when I think about all of the good things…" She trails off, and I allow my mind to catalog a few of them myself: that kiss in the blanket fort, the countless kisses that came after it, the feel of her small, fine-boned hand in mine. The way it felt to know that she was mine. That she had my heart as much as I had hers. "When I think about the good things, I could never wish they hadn't happened."

I blow out a breath. "Me either."

We lapse into silence once again, the truth between us alternately heavy as a closing curtain and light as a balloon set free. I'm honestly not sure which feels more true.

"Edward?"

"Yeah?"

"I, um. Have to go."

"Oh. Right. Sure. Okay."

"Talk to you soon?"

I won't allow myself to think that the tone in her voice is hope, even though it sounds a whole hell of a lot like it. "Definitely."

. . .

_When I read her words, I feel humbled. I knew I loved her with everything I had; I had no idea how completely, how absolutely she loved me back. I mean, yeah, I assumed. I figured. I believed her when she said it. But to read her words, to hear the absolute trust behind them, very nearly bowls me over. When I look up into her face, the face I've known since we were ankle-biters, I'm hit with a wave simultaneously familiar and foreign that my heart hitches: she's mine. Mine to love, mine to protect, mine to take care of._

"_You know I feel exactly this way too, right?" _

_A little of the nervousness in her dark brown eyes melts away, and I see her thin shoulders relax. "I do now," she says, as if she's teasing, but I can see the half-truth of it in her face._

_And when I look at her, young and trusting and vulnerable and strong and uncertain and beautiful, so beautiful, I'm overtaken once more by a wave of wonder that she's mine. _

. . .


	31. Swirl

**A/N: Sorry I missed yesterday. Life, man. Here's yesterday's chapter, and I'll post today's as well. **

**Just a heads-up: tomorrow's chapter is where EPOV picks up with the betrayal. I've had a few readers request a warning in case they'd like to avoid reading it, so here it is: chapter 32 is the start of Edward's side of that particular story. **

**Thanks, as always, for reading. xo**

. . .

_**March 8, 2013 – Word Prompt: Swirl. Dialogue Flex: "I'm proud of you."**_

. . .

"Okay, got an announcement," Emmett says, and I stop swirling my beer in my hand as I meet his eyes. He's already getting married, for crying out loud. "We're doing a destination wedding. Next month. Book your ticket to Costa Rica."

"What?"

"You, Jasper, Alice, Mom, Dad, me, Rose, and her parents." He pauses. "Unless…you want to bring a date. Of course, you can bring a date." He's looking at me intently, the probing stare that he must have learned from our mother, and I deflect his curiosity with a shake of my head.

"Thanks, Em, but the only regular dates I've had lately have been with textbooks. I'll be flying solo. Literally."

He studies me for a minute. "I know I bust your balls about the incessant studying, but I'm proud of you, little brother. You've always had your shit figured out. That's a good thing."

I bite my tongue against the first retort that comes to mind: that I was the only one of my three brothers with a steady, exclusive girlfriend when we were younger, and I'm the only one who goes to bed every night alone, still reminiscing about the love I lost when I was a teenager. It seems to me that I'm the second runner-up in the Cullen family "life on track" horse race, but I keep the thought to myself. I'd be too embarrassed to ever admit to either of my brothers just how much Bella still factors into my mind, all these years later.

He sighs. "Okay, bro. Well, I'm sure we can find you some hot Costa Rican girl to keep you company." He claps me on the shoulder just as Rosalie wafts into the house in a cloud of expensive-smelling perfume and cold winter air, bending to press her lips to Emmett's. "Hey, baby."

Em's enormous hands come up to bracket her waist. "Hey, babe. I was just telling Edward about Costa Rica."

"Oh, yeah?" Rosalie's ice-blue eyes flick to me only briefly.

It's not something I could ever really explain to anyone, but when I look at Rosalie, I don't see the girl I lost my virginity to. Thanks to the gods of low tolerance and low endurance, there's really not much to flash back to: I was drunk out of my mind and inexperienced as hell, which didn't amount to much of an interlude. I have flashes: seeing bare breasts in person for the first time, being touched for the second time, kissing her and tasting tequila. But that's it. The memories are hazy and indistinct, and could easily be memories of a porn flick I might have watched once upon a time – they're that vague. I can't _actually_ picture her naked, because thankfully, I was so plastered I don't even really _remember_ what she looked like naked. In fact, I'm not entirely sure all of her clothes even came off that night – and I don't picture our bodies moving awkwardly against each other on the rough fabric of an upholstered couch. The only thing that I remember with complete clarity is lying on the sofa afterward, watching the ceiling spin, and wishing with a sharp stab of pain that it was Bella beside me, that it was the girl I wanted to curl around and cuddle and love, and not one I just wanted to get up and walk away from. I was ashamed, and embarrassed, and when she realized it, I'm pretty sure Rosalie was, too. It's likely one of the reasons we've never talked about it since the week after it happened, when I admitted I didn't want to date her and she recovered rather nicely by going out with someone else.

These days, when I'm not seeing my brother's fiancée, all I see is the girl who cost me Bella. And yet, despite everything, I can't hate Rose…but her presence reminds me to hate myself.

. . .

"_Oh my God," I breathe, feeling the soft curves of Bella's breasts beneath her sweater, only the second time she's let me touch them, and it's driving me out of my mind. She's on top of me on her couch, and I know she has to be able to feel my hard-on pressing into her, but for the first time, she doesn't pull away, and it only makes me harder. Her small, cool hands are touching the bare skin of my stomach, and I try to hold back all of the sounds that want to spill from my lips, terrified that the smallest noise could break the spell. Then I feel her hands at the buckle of my belt, and I can't see anything through the haze of heat and want clouding my head. I feel her small fingers tugging gently, and I so desperately want to feel them on me, _really_ on me, that it's as if I could explode. When her hands leave my belt and find the skin just above the waistband, I gasp._

"_Please," I pant, forgetting for a moment my promise to myself not to ask her for anything, running my hands all over her clothes. I kiss her hard, deep, desperate._

"_Edward," she gasps, and that breathless voice sends another wave of sparks shooting through my blood. I roll us and once again take the lead, take the reins out of her hands. Picking up the pace she started, I slide the button of her jeans free, and I feel her hand wrap around my wrist._

"_Please don't stop," I plead into her hair, pressing myself shamelessly into her hip, and when she gasps, I slide my hand into her jeans. But before I can even begin to really touch her, she goes rigid, turning to stone beneath my touch._

_I still my hand, even as everything else in my body surges and races: my blood, my heart, my mind, my breathing. My cock. Finally, I make myself pull away from her, sitting up and forcing my gaze to focus on Will Ferrell, muted on the television screen._

"_Edward?" Her voice, small and uncertain, and I need another minute. I'm hard, breathless, confused, and still so fucking turned on, and I need a minute._

"_Just…give me a sec." When I feel like I can keep my composure, I look at her. When she admits the truth – that she's still not ready, that she was doing this for _me_ – I feel my heart split: she's right, but she's so, so wrong. I want her. So much that it's driving me crazy. But I love her even more than I want her._

_That's what makes dealing with the bullshit I get from the guys – for being a virgin, for dating a virgin, for barely having made it past second base – somewhat easier to swallow. Because it's _Bella.

_I pull her into the circle of my arms, and I remind myself of that simple truth, over and over. _

_It's Bella._

_. . ._


	32. Physical

**A/N: A reminder: the past segment of this chapter is the start of Edward's POV of what happened with Rosalie. If you don't want to read that, this is your exit ramp. **

. . .

_**March 9, 2013 – Word Prompt: Physical.**_

. . .

"I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride."

The sun is a fiery pearl slipping beneath the pink horizon behind them, my brother and his new wife barefoot in the sand and pressed up against each other, lost in each other, in the moment. My parents are clapping, Jasper and Alice are clapping, I'm clapping, and Emmett is beaming, his face pink with sun and love.

This is my family, the people I love together in a perfect, beautiful moment – the kind of moment you freeze and frame on a mantelpiece somewhere – and yet it's imperfect. It's my family, but there's a piece missing, and it isn't the hazy, indistinct face of a soul mate I haven't met yet. A lifetime of moments stretch out ahead of me, and staring out at a familiar ocean from a foreign coastline, the ache for a new picture pierces me with a newfound ferocity. Over the years, I've managed to dull the ache of loving Bella, missing Bella. But in this moment, my guard down, my emotions too near the surface, it sharpens anew. And, as ever, the knowledge of the pain I put her through is the sharpest of all.

In the brief reprieve between ceremony and celebration, I slip my phone from my pocket.

"Hey, Edward." The simple answer of her voice is enough to stem the tide of melancholy. "I didn't expect to hear from you this week. Aren't you in Costa Rica?"

"Yeah. I just…I wanted to ask you something."

"Okay." Still a hint of the guardedness that I'd heard when we started talking over a month ago, but it's fading, and with it, my cautious hope grows. Stupidly.

"Would you…go with me to Alice and Jasper's wedding?" I blurt, desperate to the get the words out before my sudden swell of courage ebbs and recedes.

"What?"

"I'm, uh, going to be the best man. You're going to be a bridesmaid, if not the maid of honor. Go with me." When she's silent, I rush to clarify. "As friends. Just…not as a date. Just as friends."

"Edward, they're not getting married for a while."

"I know. And you don't have to answer now. Decide when you get the invitation in the mail." And the realization blooms and blossoms before me like an island flower; suddenly, I realize that there's one area of her life I've resisted prying into until now but which I may have just overstepped in a major way. "Unless…I'm sorry, unless you're seeing someone."

"I'm not seeing anyone," she says softly.

Relief, sudden and swift and laughable. "Okay. Well…if that doesn't change…go with me."

"Maybe," she replies, and my heart gallops in my chest: it's not yes, but it's not no, either. As I'm searching for an appropriate response to her "maybe," trying to tamp down my elation at her non-no, she speaks again. "I'm sorry, I need to get back to work. Please…extend my congratulations to the bride and groom." Not lost on me that she doesn't say their names.

"I will," I promise.

"Enjoy your trip," she says before goodbye, and I'm warm as I slide my phone back into my pocket. And as I watch Emmett and Rose, Alice and Jasper, my mother and father dancing beneath a pink-orange sky, just the echo of her voice is enough to make my melancholy and loneliness ebb with the tide.

. . .

"_So," Rosalie says, plopping herself down on the couch beside me. "How's it going?"_

"_It's going," I reply, swirling the beer around in my red plastic cup, wishing once again that I was sitting in a movie theater with Bella, or at a dinner table with Bella, or anywhere with Bella. Friday nights are date nights – when you're single, you try to hook up, and when you're not, you go out with your girlfriend. Unfortunately, my girlfriend is doing a "girls-only" sleepover with Alice to make up for the fact that she's been spending most of her free time with me and, in her words, "neglecting her best friend." The only reason I even agreed to tag along with Mike to Ben's "small party" was because the house feels boring and empty since both Jasper and Emmett left for college, and hanging out with my parents on a Friday night is just lame._

"_Where's Bella?"_

"_She's having a sleepover with Alice," I reply, taking a swig of my beer and glancing around the darkened basement. Mike and Jessica are making out on a beanbag chair in the corner, and Ben has disappeared upstairs in search of his parents' "good stuff." _

_Rosalie snorts. "Cute. Are they still in middle school?"_

_I feel a wave of defensiveness crest in my chest, but I bite it back. Close on its heels is a wave of guilt, because in my less kind, more frustrated moments, similar thoughts occasionally run through my own mind. "Whatever," I reply, and Rosalie switches tactics. _

"_So…how's that going?"_

"_How's what going?"_

"_Dating a younger girl." Her eyes are a little too knowing for my taste. "Must be…frustrating."_

_I look away, my cheeks burning as I remember Mike's "Never Have I Ever" game from a while back, the pitying, half-laughing eyes watching me as I admitted the truth: that Bella and I haven't made it much farther than making out. "It has its moments," I allow, feeling slightly guilty but even more relieved. When I occasionally mention to Jasper the lack of physical gratification in my relationship, I generally get a response along the lines of, "Dude, that sucks." Finally, I look at Rosalie, and I'm faintly surprised by the understanding, open look on her face. I know as well as anyone that Rose can be a bitch, but right now, she genuinely seems…nice. "We're…taking it slowly."_

_She nods. "And that's your choice, or hers?"_

_I shrug. "Ours. I mean, if one person wants to go slow, you go slow." Briefly, I flash back to Bella's story, her words about walking together at the same pace. The pace of the slower party._

"_True," Rosalie says, angling herself toward me and propping one knee on the cushion, one elbow on the back of the couch. "But relationships are about compromise. Meeting in the middle. It's not like you have to screw each other tomorrow, but you should at least be…meeting each other's needs." Heat creeps up the back of my neck, and when I look up at her, she's looking at me expectantly. I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek. "Or…you know…" She trails off, and I feel the hand that was on the back of the couch fall on my shoulder. "There are other ways to relieve some tension so that you can focus on going as slow as she needs you to."_

_I'm so surprised that I stare at her, flabbergasted and feeling trapped – the number of times I've jerked off in the shower after leaving Bella has to number in the hundreds, but there's no way I'm confirming that to anyone, especially Rosalie Hale. At my obvious surprise, she giggles. "Not that. Close your eyes." _

_I frown, but she presses gently on my forehead and I let her tip my head back against the sofa, suddenly exhausted. A moment later, I feel a warm hand sliding beneath the waistband of my pants and boxers, and I lurch upright, staring down at my lap, where Rosalie's hand is moving beneath the denim. Despite my surprise, I harden immediately, untouched flesh rising to the occasion with total enthusiasm. "Rosalie," I blurt, reaching for her wrist, but she stills my hand with her own free one._

"_Shh. Just relax. Feel." Her words are breathed into my ear, and the sensation pushes me even closer to the edge. My mind whirs, and I force myself to think of Bella, to gather the wits to stop it, the touch I've craved so desperately for so long. But the minute Bella's face takes shape behind my closed eyes, I see the rest of her – her dark lashes, her soft neck, the gentle swell of her breasts, her full lips – and I'm coming before I can stop any of it, foreign fingers on my skin and foreign lips pressed to mine._

. . .


	33. Finesse

_**March 10, 2013 – Reflection Day**_

_**March 11, 2013 – Word Prompt: Finesse. Plot Generator—Binding Blurb: In 500 words or fewer, write a blurb or a short entry about "preconceived notions."**_

. . .

The spine is cracked, the pages dog-eared, the cover soft and worn from the countless number of times I've thumbed through it. Scoured it for every single trace of Bella.

_Songs About Summer_. It's a beautiful, meaningless title. Meaningless to me, anyway. To us. We were always about snow days and blanket forts and hot chocolate; there is nothing of "us" in Bella's book, and I spent years wondering if it was deliberate, or if she'd simply moved on so completely, so wholly, that I wasn't even worth mentioning.

The first time I opened it and read the dedication page made out to her father, I felt ridiculous for the swell of disappointment that crested behind my breastbone. I had broken so many promises to her; I have no idea what made me think she might have kept hers to me. After all, what would that dedication have said, anyway?

_To Edward. Thanks for nothing, asshole. _

_To Edward, who broke me._

_To Edward, who broke everything._

I should be grateful I was spared the wrath of writer-Bella; after all, what's that quote about the permanence of the written word? It would really suck for the transgressions of a horny eighteen-year-old to be cast in ink forever. Then again, if it meant she'd forgive me, I'd happily type the words myself.

I had always thought that Bella and I would be in each other's lives forever. I was so certain that her presence in my life was a guaranteed; even before I realized I loved her, I just took her as a constant, an ever-lingering presence. A given. What I didn't realize at the time was this: a "given" is, in fact, a "gift." And as easily as it is given, it can be taken away.

Then I fell in love with her. I had all of these ideas about what love was, and I just assumed I'd be good at it. Loving Bella was the easiest thing for me, the thing that came the most naturally, even easier than baseball and polynomials and French conjugations. I figured I'd hit it out of the park.

I never could have imagined that loving Bella was the one thing I'd fail at.

. . .

_Please, God, no. There's no way she could possibly know what happened Friday night, right? The only people who know are me and Rosalie, and even if Rose told someone, the likelihood that she'd tell someone who even talks to Bella is remote. Bella can't know._

_But she won't look at me._

_In the hallways._

_In Trig._

_At lunch, she doesn't even show up in the cafeteria, and neither does Alice._

_The uncertainty is making me anxious, paranoid, desperate. I don't want to even think about what it would mean if she found out, but the possibility is at the forefront of my mind and refuses to be ignored. I'm such an idiot, and I don't even know how it happened._

_And I know exactly how that will sound if I do, in fact, have to say those words to Bella: like an inadequate excuse. Like a lie. I've never lied to her. There's no way to finesse an explanation out of what happened on Friday: that I was horny and stupid and buzzed and too slow on the uptake to realize what was going on until it was all but over. Does that count as cheating?  
I know the answer. It's simple, and I know the answer without a doubt because it's the first time in my life I'm tempted to lie to her, the first time in my life that telling her the truth scares me. But losing her scares me even more, which is why I didn't say anything when I was sitting next to her on Chief Swan's couch yesterday afternoon, studying trig notes and trying not to feel like a heathen._

_But I didn't mean to._

_And I can't bring myself to believe that something so meaningless, something I didn't even want, could cost me the one thing that matters the most._

_When I catch her by the elbow in the student lot after school, she goes rigid beneath my touch; not a new reaction, but the situation is entirely different. She's never tensed away from my casual touches before, and a spike of fear pierces my chest. "Bella, what the hell? What's wrong?" Brown eyes meet mine, and for the first time, she looks like a stranger. The fear mounts. "What happened?"_

"_You tell me."_

_Oh, God. "What?"_

_She squares her shoulders, and for a brief, fleeting moment, I want to run away from the truth I know is coming. "You tell me, Edward. Tell me you didn't kiss someone else." She's so brave, so strong, and I realize the irony in the fact that while I always wanted to protect her from everything, I'm the one who holds all the power to hurt her right now. Before I can say anything, those brown eyes are swimming with tears, and she turns away._

"_It didn't mean anything." Just as I thought, it sounds empty. Hollow. Meaningless. Like the experience itself._

"_It does to me." _

"_Bella."_

"_How can a kiss with me be 'enough,' and a kiss with someone else mean nothing?"_

"_Your kisses are more than enough," I try, realizing even as I say the words that we're talking about a kiss, and even Bella – beautiful, innocent, inexperienced Bella – isn't that naïve. She doesn't know. Not everything._

"_Apparently not." And I know. I know, as she starts laying the foundation of a wall between us, that I'm losing her._

"_Please," I beg. "Let me explain." Even though I have no idea what I'll say. How I'll explain anything._

"_No," she says, her voice colder than I've ever heard it. And then, for the first time I can remember, she walks away from me._

. . .


	34. Backlash

**A/N: Another heads-up for those who requested it: this chapter is EPOV of the party at Rosalie's. Again, this is your cue to exit, stage left, if you don't want to read it.**

. . .

_**March 12, 2013 – Word Prompt: Backlash. Dialogue Flex: "There won't be another opportunity like this again."**_

. . .

The woman giggles, fingering the stem of her wine glass with her fingertips, her blood-red nails shining beneath the ambient lighting of the downtown Seattle restaurant. I force myself to smile, all too aware of the fact that both Alice and Jasper are watching me intently; Jasper's look is encouraging but, as usual, I can't decipher the look in Alice's unnerving gray eyes.

I can't believe I agreed to this. Dinner with a coworker of Jasper's sounded relatively innocuous when he presented it a month ago, and while I initially protested – always, it seems, I protest – he ultimately talked me into it. "A casual dinner. She's new in town. She doesn't know anyone." And so I agreed, but dinner has only grown more uncomfortable as the night wears on. She's too blond. She's too blue-eyed. She's too interested. She's too…not who I want her to be.

And it's ridiculous, because Bella and I are over. We have been for six years, thanks entirely to my own actions. And yet just the simple act of talking to her again over the past few weeks has made me feel a familiar flicker of obligation: to protect her. To love her, as if I ever stopped. To honor a commitment to her, even if it only exists in my mind. To wait and see if there's even the smallest glimmer of possibility before I go down a road that doesn't lead to her.

A server appears to offer dessert, and Jasper's phone rings from his pocket. He excuses himself to take the call, and Alice takes the cue to visit the ladies' room. The girl – _Laura_, I remind myself – and I glance at each other in slightly nervous embarrassment over her nearly-empty wine glass and my completely empty tumbler that once held two fingers of Scotch.

"I'm having a really nice time," she murmurs, leaning forward to rest her elbows on the table, and I nod, coaxing a friendly smile to my face.

"Me too." I realize my mistake when a spark of hope flares in her blue eyes. Suddenly, I feel her foot brushing faintly against my ankle, not enough to be overtly suggestive, but just enough to serve as the hint I suspect she's going for.

"It was really nice of your brother to set this up."

"He's a good guy," I agree, hoping to steer the conversation in a neutral, innocuous direction.

"He is." She leans farther forward, and the classy, elegant blouse she's wearing gapes just enough to show me a hint of her cleavage. It's the kind of thing I'd generally find incredibly sexy – a girl who isn't obvious, but isn't afraid to suggest at what she wants – but I'm left cold. "But I wouldn't mind at all if we ditched them for the remainder of the evening and got to know each other a little bit better."

And this is where it becomes even clearer that the woman knows how to play the game, because she's left it wide open: for dessert and coffee at a table for two somewhere else, or a sweaty roll in the sheets back at my apartment.

And I could. I'm single, young, healthy, and I could take this smart, pretty, friendly girl home and get laid without any fear of backlash, consequences, problems. And while there's a tiny, entirely male part of my brain that wants to take her up on the offer, the rest of me is screaming the truth: I may be single, but I'm not available, and pretending otherwise would be a lie.

And, if there's one way in which Rosalie did me a favor six years ago, it was giving me an immediate and bone-deep dislike of casual sex.

Laura's looking at me expectantly, and I search for the most graceful way to get out of it without lying; in the absence of inspiration, I excuse myself to the men's room.

In the darkened hallway leading to the restrooms, I cross paths with Alice. She's standing against the wall, scrolling through her phone. When she looks up as I approach, the screen bathing her face in white-blue light, I smile. "Was that phone call choreographed, or just coincidental?"

She smiles in return. "Coincidental. But I'm sure he would have found another reason to leave you two alone. He's a matchmaker at heart." I take a place beside her, leaning my shoulder blades against the wall painted the color of an eggplant. "She's nice," Alice offers, and I look down at my shoes.

"Yeah."

"Why don't you date?" Immediate, blunt, and my surprised eyes lift to hers.

"Sorry?"

"You don't date. Why not?"

"I…date."

"Not really." When I don't say anything, Alice lets her head tip back so that it's resting against the wall. "Bella's doing really well. I think whatever you guys talked about at Thanksgiving helped her."

I have no idea what that means. "Yeah?"

"She's…making peace with all that stuff from high school. Finally."

Making peace. That's what you do with something when you're laying it to rest, and it occurs to me that all of the conversations that to me felt like hello might be a long, drawn-out goodbye to her.

"That's…good."

"Jesus, you're a bad liar. Good thing you ultimately went with the honesty thing six years ago, because your poker face is shit." I've never heard Alice be quite so blunt before, nor has she ever willingly talked about the mistakes I made when I was eighteen, and my surprise must show on my face because she rolls her eyes. "You want her back."

It isn't a question, so I don't feel obligated to answer. Still, the words pierce me with their truth. If ever, in any universe, it were a possibility, I'd want it more than anything. "I don't know that that's possible." A non-answer, and I feel very lawyer-like all of a sudden. But it isn't lost on me that if there's anyone in the world who might have more vested interest in Bella's heart than me, it's Alice.

"She went through a lot of shit because of you." There's a spark, a fire, and I know who picked up the reins of taking care of Bella when I dropped them.

"Yeah."

"I don't know that she'll ever trust you again. Not like she did."

Nothing I don't already know, but it hurts just the same. "I know."

"She deserves more than being with someone she can't trust completely. That's a rough way to love."

"I've missed being her friend," I reply when I have nothing else, and it's the truest lie I've ever told. I missed it the most, but my love was always wrapped up in my friendship, conjoined twins that could never be separated.

"Me too," Alice says, dropping the subject, and we stand in silence in a darkened hallway, and I wonder if I have a new ally, or if Alice is simply the mouthpiece for the truths Bella is too hesitant to tell me.

. . .

"_Come on, dude. Rosalie's parents are out of town, and her house is a fucking _mansion._ This is a one-time thing; there won't be another opportunity like this again." Ben is annoying, but he's one of the only people who has made the effort to entice me out of my den of self-loathing since the day Bella essentially broke up with me, told me she couldn't forgive me, slammed her front door in my face. I still can't quite believe I lost her, that I was that stupid. That with everything we've been through together, after a lifetime of friendship, there isn't a way to get her to forgive me. To hear me. That despite how much I love her, I don't have the power to fix the hurt I've caused her._

"_I'm not really in a party mood, Ben." Not really in the mood for much of anything, except sitting in my darkened bedroom and trying to figure out how to make it right. I try to put myself in her shoes, to imagine what it would take if she'd let some other guy touch her, but the mere thought of it makes my stomach turn and my chest ache, and I can't bring myself to explore it any deeper._

"_Nothing a few shots of Jack couldn't fix," Ben says, and I shrug, lacking the energy to argue. I'm so tired, and I don't have it in me to fight. I want to fight for Bella, but she won't let me, and the despair and the misery at the knowledge that she could choose not to forgive me is so unlike the Bella I know, the Bella I love, that it only makes me feel more lost._

_I'm exhausted from hating myself, and it's only been a week. Knowing Bella hates me is an entirely separate exhaustion, one that makes me cry like a girl every time I let myself think about it. Bella has never hated me, even when we were kids and I'd do something to make her mad. She's always forgiven me, always cared despite my idiocy, but this time it's different, and I feel lost, adrift, cut loose without her. And the knowledge of what I've done to her is a deeper torture than I'm equipped to handle. Knowing that I took that beautiful, fragile heart and essentially smashed it on the blacktop of the school parking lot is what keeps me up at night, my desperation to fix it like a wheel in a mud puddle: spinning and spinning as fast as it can possibly go but getting nowhere, succeeding only in showering more mud over everything nearby._

_When we step into Rosalie Hale's enormous house, I immediately want to go home. I don't want to be here, watching my teammates with girls draped all over them, seeing furtive gropes and shameless kisses around me, reminding me of everything I was too stupid to hold on to._

_Ben claps me on the shoulder and leads me to a corner of the room where Mike is wielding a bottle of Southern Comfort and lining up a row of shot glasses on a glass coffee table. "Come one, come all," he booms, turning the bottle over and filling the glasses as we find seats on the couch._

_The first one makes my chest burn almost enough to erase the emotional burn that has been smoldering for days, eviscerating me from the inside out._

_The second goes down easier, numbing the burn of the first._

_The third makes everything easier, the sounds, sights, reminders of the party around me fading to a blurry backdrop._

_After the fourth, I feel nothing. Numb. Blessedly._

"_Hey there." Rosalie's voice in my ear, hand on my shoulder, and as I whip my head around to look for Ben, the room swims. "Whoa," she says, laughing, rounding the couch and lowering herself into my lap. "Someone's having fun." It's a lie. This isn't fun. But it doesn't hurt like everything else, and maybe that's enough just for tonight. Another shot, and this time, Rosalie takes one, too. The room continues to swim, and if I close my eyes, I can almost imagine it's Bella's weight on my thighs, her arm crooked around my neck. When I open them again, Mike's rummaging around for another bottle, the SoCo empty and lying on its side on the now-sticky tabletop, and Rosalie leans in, voice in my ear barely more than breath. "Come with me." She loops her arm through mine and pulls me gently from the couch; I'm faintly grateful, because the room swims and lurches, and I know if I'd had another shot, I'd have thrown up all over the table. The room is suddenly too warm, and I follow Rosalie's lead, hoping desperately that she's taking me outside, taking me home, taking me away. It takes all of my concentration not to knock into people, walls, tables on my way through the crowd. I'm drunk, and I've never really been drunk, and I feel sick and free and depressed and relieved and like someone else entirely. And I miss Bella._

_I follow Rosalie through a door and into a darker room, where she pushes gently on my chest, and suddenly I'm sitting on another sofa, the party pulsing behind the closed wooden door on the other side of the black room, walls of photos and books and other office-like things ghostly silhouettes around us. A study, my inebriated mind supplies, and it isn't until she's in my lap that I realize why this girl has pulled me into this room. She kisses me, something sweet and faintly alcoholic on her breath, and I don't kiss her back, too stunned and confused and lost to figure out how I feel about it. "It's okay," she murmurs against my mouth, hands at my belt buckle, and it's the first time I've been the inexperienced one, the first time I've been the one needing reassurance. And just for a second, I allow myself to imagine letting this happen._

_I picture being with someone who doesn't need me to take control, someone who doesn't need me to protect her, to shield her, to guide her. I picture what it might feel like to be free to just…let go._

_Then Rosalie's hands are in my pants and her top is off and I'm hard and it's happening, and the room is spinning in a haze of hormones and liquor and I'm so tired of feeling like shit and hurting and hating myself and despite the fact that kissing someone who isn't Bella leaves me cold, the possibility that this could feel good is too big a temptation to resist._

_And I let it happen._

_And I never would have thought it possible, but afterward, I hate myself even more._

. . .


	35. Abusive, Exclusive, Reclusive

_**March 13, 2013 – Word Prompts: Abusive, exclusive, reclusive.**_

. . .

"Hi." Bella's voice is soft in my ear as I open my apartment door, and I wonder if it means something that she's calling me the night I say no to the first woman to offer me anything in ages.

"Hi." The door clicks closed behind me, and I'm alone in my apartment. A familiar sensation, given what Emmett refers to as my reclusive tendencies. But also most decidedly _not_ alone, because for this moment anyway, I have Bella. "How are you?"

"I'm good. How are you?"

"Good."

"No big plans on a Friday night?" she teases, and it would be so, so easy to lie. But I can't.

"I actually just got home."

"Oh." I can hear the hesitation, the unwillingness to ask, so I man up.

"Jasper set up a sort of…double-date," I say, and I wonder briefly why my palm is hurting before realizing that I'm squeezing my keys in a white-knuckled fist.

"Oh." For a woman who makes her money in words, she doesn't give me many of them, and I try not to let the familiar guilt crest.

"More of a favor to him," I continue.

"How was it?"

"The steak was good," I say, and to my relief, I hear a soft, barely-there chuckle.

"The steak, huh? Is that a euphemism?"

"Definitely not." Her candor surprises me, and I'm taken back to her words from before: she's different now, and while at first the thought made me sad, now it only intrigues me. I just hope she'll let me discover all the ways in which it's true.

"Okay."

"What about you?"

"I called _you_, didn't I?" I try not to read into the implication that, if she had something better to do, my phone would have stayed silent. Instead, I silence my abusive self-monologue.

"You did. How was your week?"

"Oh, you know. The usual." But I don't, and I want to ask, and I don't know if I'm allowed, because even after three months of these occasional chats, this slow getting-to-know-you-again small-talk, I have no exclusive rights to the details of her life. Even if I want them. "How's Alice?"

"Good," I say, curious suddenly about how often they speak, if that's another bridge that she's rebuilding. That train of thought brings me back around to my fear from earlier: that while I'm thinking we're building, Bella thinks we're just clearing away the rubble of something we demolished years ago. "She, um. Actually mentioned you."

"Oh?"

"She said you were…doing better. With stuff. Our stuff. From high school." Jesus, I sound like an idiot.

But Bella still speaks my language, even after all this time, and that has to count for something. "Yeah. I think I am."

"Yeah?"

"I'm…coming to terms with everything, I guess. Making my peace."

There's that phrase again. "That's what Alice said." And I can't take the possibility of this being goodbye. I have to know. "Can I ask you something?"

"Yeah."

"Is this…when you say 'making peace.' Does that mean you're trying to put _me_ behind you? Or just that you're trying to put what happened behind you?"

She's quiet for a few minutes, and as always, I have to force myself to be patient, not to push. "I guess I'm coming to grips with the truth of it all. With the realization that I was mad at you for what you did, but I was also mad at you for some things that, in the long run, you had no control over."

I'm grateful, for once, that she isn't sitting across from me, because I'm positive that the surprise is etched into my face. "Like what?"

"Like my first time not being what I wanted it to be." I'm faintly surprised by the sharp stab of pain that spears my chest at her words, at the sharp, matter-of-fact tone in which she delivers them. It's not as if I was harboring delusions that Bella was still a virgin, that there was still any hope of my being her first. But when I picture her sharing that moment, that experience, that milestone with someone else, it makes me want to cry or yell or put my fist through a wall. Likely all the things she was feeling years ago, magnified a thousand times by betrayal. "Edward?" she murmurs when the silence has dragged on for too long, and I try to quell the furious surge of emotion her confession has unleashed.

"I'm here," I reply, forcing as much neutrality as I can into my voice.

"I was mad at you for that, and it wasn't your fault."

"Yes," I say, wondering if my voice sounds as sad as I feel. "It was."

"No, it—"

"It was," I say again. "Was it…" I trail off, unsure as to how to put words to the question swirling around in my brain amid images of Bella beneath someone else's body, someone else's fingertips, someone else's kisses. Someone else's pounding heart. "Was it bad?" A tiny, ugly part of me wants her to say yes, to let me believe that in those moments afterward, she had at least a shred of regret that made her think of me. Made her wish, despite all of the ways I let her down, that it had been with me. But the bigger part of me – the more mature, more selfless part, the part that deserved her once upon a time – wants her to say no, to tell me that while I stole a lot from her, she was able to find someone else who made that experience what it should have been for her. What she deserved it to be.

"No," she says instantly, and I'm proud of the immediate swell of relief at her words. But the relief is short-lived as she continues. "It wasn't…bad. It just…wasn't special. For something I'd put so much hope on being special, it just…wasn't."

"That _is_ my fault," I reply, and self-recrimination is thick in my voice. "I would have made it special for you. It would have been, if I hadn't—"

"Don't," she cuts me off. "That's not why I'm telling you this. I'm trying to make you understand that some of my anger at you was my own stuff, you know?"

"Who—" I trail off, debating the merits of details. Knowing I don't have the right to ask, knowing our friendship isn't there yet and wondering if it ever will be.

"A guy who lived in my freshman dorm," she says simply, and I try to read more into her voice, but the words are bland. I wonder if that's intentional. "He was nice. Friendly. Funny. We dated for a while." I try to picture this guy, but unsurprisingly, I can't.

"Well, that's good," I say finally, unsure of where we go from here. "I'm glad it was…okay."

She laughs, and the light, tinkling sound loosens the knot in my chest. "Yeah. It was okay. Just the adjective a girl dreams of for her first time." A familiar guilt niggles the edge of my brain, but the levity in her voice tells me that she isn't rehashing the blame game. We're silent for a few moments before she speaks again, and the cautious tone of self-preservation has crept back into her voice, the tone I've come to hate because of what it implies: that between my loving her and losing her, she came to view me as someone she needed to protect herself from. "What about you?"

I'm slightly adrift in the rolling sea of conversation and emotion, and I frown at my wall. "Me?"

"Yeah. Your…first time." I think I hear her swallow, but it's hard to hear subtle sounds over the suddenly thumping beat of my own heart in my ears. "Was it…okay?"

"Bella," I say, the word barely more than breath, but I don't know where else to go with it. She _knows_ what my first time was, and I know what it did to her. I really have no idea what she's asking.

As if she's read my mind, she speaks again, her voice low. "I've spent years imagining it, you know. Even though I never wanted to. It's like…one of those worst-case-scenario things that you can't switch off – I just…kept picturing it, but because I never really knew what happened, my brain sort of came up with all of these possible scenarios, each one worse than the last."

"I'll tell you whatever you want to know," I say softly, because if this is something I can give her, some way to take away at least the pain of wondering, I'll do whatever I can.

"I guess I just…how did it happen?"

For a brief moment, I let myself think back to that night: the storm of self-loathing I'd been living in for a week, the loneliness of losing the girl I loved and my best friend in one spectacular mistake of my own making, the unfamiliar hazy cloud of alcohol muddling my thoughts and only barely numbing my pain. "I went to the baseball team's party. At Rosalie's. I got really drunk on shots, and at some point she sat in my lap. We were all sitting in the living room, but then Mike ran out of liquor. I was just sitting there, wasted, wondering how the hell I was going to get home, and then Rosalie was pulling me to my feet. I sort of thought she was going to take me home because she wasn't nearly as drunk as I was. But then she was guiding me into another room. Then she was kissing me." I pause, listening to Bella's steady breaths through the phone line. "Are you…is this…"

"I'm fine," she says, her voice uncharacteristically neutral, and I don't like it. "Keep going."

I lick my lips, discomfort and guilt and shame a familiar prickly blend within me. "I, uh…she took off her shirt and then started undressing me, and then we just sort of…fell on the couch. I didn't…it didn't last very long." I suppose I should be ashamed of that fact, but frankly, I'm only glad.

"Edward?"

"Yeah?"

"If you hadn't…I mean, if I hadn't been a factor. If sleeping with Rosalie hadn't hurt me…would you have still regretted it?"

I frown. "I'm not sure I know what you mean."

"I mean…as first times go. Would you still regret it if I hadn't been in the picture?"

"Yes," I say immediately, fiercely, the moment I catch on. "Bella, I didn't love Rosalie. I didn't even really _like_ her. I never would have had sex with her that night if I'd been sober. The only reason it happened is because I was wasted and sad and stupid and…" I trail off, feeling embarrassed suddenly. Stupidly, because what more can I confess that could be more embarrassing than what I've already shared?

"And?" she presses.

"Selfish. It was a mistake. It would have been a mistake even if you hadn't been a factor. The fact that you were…just makes it that much more selfish." The word is right there on the tip of my tongue. "More unforgivable."

"I'm sorry," she says after a moment.

"Sorry?"

"That your first time wasn't special, either," she says, and her voice is the voice of my best friend, the girl who loved me long before we were in love. The girl who would have been gentle with my heart, even if I'd never given it to her to hold in the palm of her hand. And I realize, with the kind of clarity reminiscent of a parting of clouds, that even if we never get back to where we were, and even if all we ever have is the friendship of Christmas cards and occasional phone calls filled with remember-whens and how-are-yous, that part of me will love this girl and her soft, kind heart for as long as I live.

"Bella," I say, because I'm bowled over by gentleness I don't deserve, and I can't say anything else.

Suddenly, I hear the sound of a dog barking in the background, and the soft, intimate tone of voice I remember from inside a blanket fort vanishes, replaced by something bolder, something more distant. "Shoot. Sorry, I have to go. I have plans, and…my doorbell just rang."

"Oh. Sure, of course. Sorry. Have a good night."

"Thanks, Edward. You too." She pauses, and I want to keep her on the line forever. "It was good talking to you." It's the same thing she said the first time we talked, but this time, I hear what she means: it was good _talking_. Telling each other things. Real things.

"It was good talking to you, too."

. . .


	36. Letter

_**March 14, 2013 – Scenario: While refinishing an old desk you purchased at an estate sale, you discover a letter wedged between two drawers. What does the letter say? Who wrote it? For whom was it intended?**_

. . .

When she answers, she sounds breathless, and immediately I try not to imagine the myriad reasons she could be. "It this a bad time?"

"Not at all," she says, even though it sounds like she's on a treadmill. "I'm just walking to my car."

"Walking?"

"What?"

"You sound breathless."

"Oh. I'm walking in heels. In the dark. No matter how comfortable I get here, I can never entirely banish Charlie's self-defense tips from my mind when I'm walking alone at night."

"Oh." I realize, suddenly, that I've never seen Bella in heels. Not real ones, anyway; nothing close, with the exception of the tiny ones she wore to homecoming a million years ago. The realization is one more thing reminding me that for all I miss Bella the girl, there's a whole host of things I don't know about Bella the woman. Close on the heels of that realization comes another: it's Friday night, and how many reasons are there for beautiful, single women to wear heels on a Friday night? Still, she's walking to her car alone, so I press on.

"Hot date?"

She chuckles, and I feel my shoulders relax. "Oh, yeah. With a fifty-something woman. She loves good books and red wine, so I think I may have found my soul mate." Off my silence, she laughs again, and I think maybe I could spend forever listening to her laugh from hundreds of miles away. "My editor. We were meeting to talk about my next project."

"Oh." Her first project still haunts me in its ambiguity. "What's it about?"

"I'm not really sure yet. I've kind of been working on a few different things."

"Any you'd care to share?"

A beat of silence, then: "Letters."

"Letters?"

"I found this old letter in a desk I bought at an estate sale awhile back. There was no envelope, and it was in pretty pristine shape, so I have no idea if it was ever even sent."

I prop my feet up on my coffee table and lean back into the cushions of my sofa, beer bottle resting on one thigh, cold seeping through my jeans. "That's wild. What did it say?"

"It was sort of…an un-love letter."

"An un-love letter?"

"From someone who'd had his heart broken and was writing to the woman who broke it. It got me thinking about the lost art of the letter, and how so much of the language of love and loss is getting lost in more modern, digital communication. But that's really as far as I've gotten with it; I don't really know what a book like that would look like, or how I'd even go about writing it."

"I'd read it," I say, leaving out the rest of the truncated truth: I'd read anything she wrote. Even if it was an un-love letter itemizing all of the ways I'd let her down.

"Well, if there are a couple thousand other people who feel the same way, maybe it'll be something someday." I hear the muted thunk of a car door closing, and she exhales. "So. How was your day?"

I smile at my coffee table at the utter simplicity, the lovely amiability of her question and the moment. "It was good, thanks. Though this is the highlight."

"Yikes. That's pretty sad."

I don't correct her; instead, I plow forward. "Hey, I'm going to be in Sacramento next month. Can I buy you dinner?"

Again, silence. "Um. Well, Sacramento's an hour and a half away."

"I don't mind driving." Another truncated truth. I'd drive from Seattle to Tallahassee if it bought me minutes in her company.

"Okay. I guess so." Wary. Hesitant. Unsure.

"Hey, Bella?"

"Yeah."

"You can say no." It's the same reassurance I gave her years ago; I wonder if the parallels ricochet around in her mind the way they do in my own. "It's okay if you're not ready for that, or you don't feel comfortable. I'll understand."

A brief pause, and if she were the Bella I once knew, she'd be biting her bottom lip, eyes gazing out unseeingly as she weighed the pros and cons. But I know very little of this Bella, and so I wait. "No," she says finally, and my heart plummets. "No, I think…that would be nice." And it soars. "But this is my city. I'm buying."

"Not a chance."

"You won't even know where to go."

"So you'll tell me."

"I'll pick the cheapest dive restaurant ever unless you let me buy."

Open my mouth to protest again, and sudden clarity strikes: this isn't a date. Perhaps this – her insistence at paying – is her attempt to make clear that it's not a date. "Okay. On one condition."

"Hm. What is it?" Wary, again. Wary, always, where I'm concerned.

"Write me a letter."

"Excuse me?"

"An un-love letter. Or an un-friend letter. Or just a letter. Write me one." Because that's me: always asking things of her.

"Okay," she says finally, softly.

"Yeah?"

"If you really want one." There's a warning note in her voice, but a letter – even if it details all of the reasons she has spent years hating me – is more of her words, more of _her_, and that's something I'd never say no to.

"I really do."

. . .

_There are girls everywhere, but not the one I want. Never the one I want. The one I want is the only one I can't see, the only one who hides herself away from me, keeps her distance. I say no to a lot of invitations, a lot of offers, and every time I say no, my conscience ridicules me: such a simple word, and where was it when I really needed it? When it would have saved me – saved us – so much heartache?_

_Rosalie, thankfully, isn't among them, but the rest are there. At my car. At my lunch table. At my locker, my desk, waiting outside the locker room after baseball practice. One even manages to get into the locker room while I'm in the shower, and I don't think I'll ever live down the team's disbelief that I turned down her rather overt advances. But the appeal of what I thought I wanted so badly, what I was so curious about, what I couldn't stop myself from picturing, daydreaming about, wanting desperately, has soured in the harsh light of what it cost me._

_On the rare occasions that I do see Bella – in Trig, in the hallways, in the cafeteria - I watch her, not even trying to hide it, hoping against hope that she'll see the anguish, the desperate shame, the pleading hope in my eyes. But she never looks at me, and every time her brown eyes avoid mine, she feels even farther away. She looks even smaller now, though I wouldn't have thought it possible; her shoulders hunch as if she's curling in on herself, trying to shield her soft underbelly, and idly I wonder what she's protecting herself against. When the truth comes to me, I feel as if I've broken us all over again._

_I call, but she never answers. When I get Charlie, the disappointment in his voice is its own censure; we were the two men charged with taking care of the same girl, and I'm the half of the equation that failed miserably. When my mother tentatively asks me where Bella is one afternoon a week after Rosalie's party, I break down. It's the first time I've cried in my mother's arms since I was a child._

. . .


	37. Staircase

**A/N: This one's for Monica, with hugs. **

**Thanks, as always, for reading. xo**

. . .

_**March 15, 2013 – Word Prompt: Staircase. Plot Generator—Phrase Catch: Secrets and lies.**_

. . .

_Dear Edward,_

_Here's the thing nobody tells you about losing your virginity: that in some cases, it's possible that not giving it up will be the thing you will come to regret. They – and by the vague "they," I mean teachers, parents, "family-values" touters, health educators – tell you to cherish it, to hold on to it, to protect it like a precious jewel that an army of randy boys will constantly be trying to pluck from your shaky fingers. But what they don't tell you is this: that there might come a day when you'll regret not giving it up to the boy you loved. That there's a window where it will be special and meaningful and everything your first time should be, and that it's entirely possible to miss that window and end up giving it up to someone who will ultimately wind up being an otherwise unexceptional extra in your life's main cast of characters._

_That's my dirty little secret, my pebble of guilt that I carry when I think about what happened with us: I wish I'd said yes. Homecoming night, the night of Ben's party, a million other nights when I was in your arms and loved, I wish I'd said yes. I wish I'd been braver. I wish I'd been ready. I wish I'd known then what I know now: that there are some things in this life that you just don't get to be ready for, but for which you have to put on your big-girl shoes and take a leap of faith._

_You were worth that leap of faith, Edward. Even knowing what I know now, even with all of the ugly stuff that happened with us, I still know that to be true: you were worth the leap. I regret that I was too cowardly to take it. With all of the times I trusted you to look out for me – climbing trees, diving off platforms, riding our bikes down steep hills – you always came through. I regret that I didn't trust you in this, too._

_And that brings me to my other regret, a truth I was too angry, too hurt, too humiliated to openly acknowledge before now: I regret that my reticence hurt you, too. I'm sure you think I didn't notice, but I saw how much you regretted what happened with Rosalie. I know it hurt you, and at the time (and even in the years since), it was easy for me to disregard your hurt because I saw it as a result of your own actions. But with more time and distance, I can acknowledge the truth: that you were hurting, too – possibly almost as much as I was – and part of the reason we wound up in that mess was because I was afraid. I'm sorry for that. And I'm sorry for pretending all the blame was yours, because that was a lie._

_That said, I think there's a tiny part of my heart that will always be seventeen, and will always be hurt by what happened between us back then. I think everyone – or, at least, every woman – carries around the most insecure version of herself, tucked away in some corner of her heart like a constant reminder of her weakest self, in part to remember not to go back to the place, and in part to remember that even in her strongest moments, there's still vulnerability at her core. I don't know if this is the same for men, or if that's one of the fundamental differences. Maybe you don't have that, or maybe you do and you just hide it better. Either way, there's a tiny part of me that will always be the Bella who had her heart broken by the boy she loved most in the world. But it's my goal to find a way to make that a source of strength instead of the bitter pill it's been for the past six years._

_If you're still the boy I thought you were, I suspect there's a part of your heart that matches mine; I hope that you, too, can find the value in it. Maybe that's the meaning behind all of this; maybe we're meant to help each other find our way to that point. The point of letting go of old hurts. I'd be okay with that. Would you?_

_Your friend,  
__Bella_

I tuck the letter back inside its envelope, my heart a heavy wrecking ball in my chest, swaying ominously from side to side.

_Letting go_.

. . .

_I can hear the sound of feet on the staircase, and I bury my face into my pillow, hoping in vain to be left alone._

"_Sweetheart?" My mother's single-knuckle rap on my bedroom door is as tentative as her voice, and I roll to my back, staring at my white ceiling. _

"_Yeah."_

"_Can I come in?"_

"_Sure." _

_I hear the door creak open, my mother's soft footfalls on the carpeted floor, the soft squeak of a mattress spring as she perches on the edge of my bed. "Do you want some lunch?"_

"_No, thanks."_

"_How about some hot chocolate?"_

_I turn my face away; a mistake, because the first thing my eyes fall on is the homecoming picture of me with my arms wrapped around Bella. I close them instead. "No, thanks."_

"_Your brothers are coming home for dinner." _

_It's an intervention; I know it, but I don't have the energy to protest it or even acknowledge it. "Okay."_

_There's a hesitant pause before my mother speaks again, and as much as I love her, her purposeful not-pushing-but-definitely-hovering is sort of driving me crazy. "I saw Bella at the store."_

_I jolt upright, propping myself on my elbows, and my mother looks mildly startled. "What did she…did she…did you say hello?"_

"_I did." My mother's eyes are sad, and I can read the words she doesn't say aloud. Bella didn't say anything about me. Finally, it's as if my mother has had all she can take, and she leans forward, clasping my hand in hers. Ironically, I'm reminded of Bella's hand: fine-boned wrist, small palm, cool fingers. "Edward, what happened?"_

_She has a combination of eyes – my green and Jasper's blue – and I've always liked the way the colors swirl together like the ocean, but in this moment, shame a hot poker through my chest, I can't meet them. "I hurt her."_

"_Why?"_

_Not how, but why. "I don't know. I wasn't thinking." I try to find a way to explain without explaining, because what guy wants to tell his mother he got a hand job from and then lost his virginity to a girl he barely even likes, all because his girlfriend was at home having a sleepover? "I hurt her because I wasn't thinking, and she can't forgive me."_

_Tightness in my eyes, my chest, my throat, and I look away again; one episode of an eighteen-year-old guy crying in his mother's lap is one too many. "That doesn't sound like Bella."_

_I don't admit the truth: that in the span of a week, both Bella and I have become strangers to each other, and – if she's feeling anything like I am – to ourselves._

. . .


	38. Job

. . .

_**March 16, 2013 – Word Prompt: Job. **_

. . .

I haven't heard from Bella since I got her letter. Granted, I'm generally the one calling her, but even after all the time and distance between us, I know she's lobbed the ball into my court and is waiting for my return volley. I sit at the small desk in my room, watching light dance in the beads of rainwater on my windowpane, Bella's letter at my elbow. It's already got that cotton-soft feel of paper that's been folded and unfolded, handled too often, and I've lost count of how many times I've read and reread it in the six days since it arrived. The stationery before me is blank, as is my mind, and when I look up, the photo my mother sent me from Emmett's wedding – the five of us together, brilliant Pacific Ocean sunset behind us – catches my eye.

I look at my parents again, my father's arm around my mother's waist, the purple fabric of her dress slightly crumpled where he's pulling her into him, and something low in my stomach aches.

. . .

_My father is the one who tries next. I'm in the driveway pitching a ball against the brick side of the house and catching it in the webbed pocket of my mitt, trying to find comfort in the soothing repetition of a familiar habit. _

_The smack of the ball against leather. _

_The thud of the ball against the house. _

_The thump of the ball against the concrete driveway. _

_The chalk rectangle I've redrawn a million times looms large ahead of me, and I try with all of my focus not to see anything inside the frame but a strike zone. But the only thing that box looks like is what I feel: empty._

"_How's the change-up coming along?" My father's voice surprises me, and I glance over my shoulder before shrugging._

"_Okay." I don't give him the whole truth: that the pitch I thought I'd mastered – the splitter – is the one I can't seem to handle anymore. There's something about thinking you know the path of something only to have it switch at the last minute that's messing with my head._

"_Want me to grab my glove and give you a real catcher?" he offers, hope evident in his blue eyes. _

_I shrug – not an answer either way – but he's back moments later with a worn catcher's mitt on one hand, the beat-up chest protector my mother insisted on after my first successful curveball nailed him in the ribs draped around his neck. He tips his head toward the grass, and I follow him, pacing out the distance between mound and home plate as my father squats. _

"_Not on call?" I ask, lobbing a few easy throws to get his palm warmed up. My father's job – and its crazy schedule – is one of the things that has significantly limited the opportunities we have to do this._

"_Not today," he says simply, lobbing the ball back. After a few more cordial tosses, he cuts to the heart of it. "Your mom's worried about you."_

"_I know." Because I do – I can see her watching, hovering but trying not to, biting her lip against the avalanche of questions I'm sure she has._

"_Want to hash it out?" He winces slightly as my first full-force fastball smacks his palm._

"_Not really."_

_He tosses it back. "Might help."_

_I appreciate the offer, but the only thing that would help would be going back and undoing what I did – somehow erasing the hurt I caused Bella – and as much as I love my dad, as much as I spent years as a kid thinking he was a superhero because he could save lives, this is something that even he can't do. And yet, there's a part of me that sort of wants to at least say some of it aloud, to confess to someone who's required to love me no matter what. _

_I throw a few more pitches – fastball, fastball, curveball, slider – before blowing out a breath. "I let her down."_

_My father simply nods, catching what I throw at him: knuckleball, slider, fastball. But when I try a splitter, the ball breaks left and past my dad, bouncing down the lawn and dropping into the gutter. Without thinking, I hurl my glove after it, and my father rises from his crouch, pulling off his own glove and tucking it under his arm._

"_Hey," he says with a frown, but there's no admonishment in his voice._

"_Sorry." I walk to the curb and bend to retrieve my glove and the ball, but immediately my dad is beside me, hand on my shoulder._

"_Sit," he orders, and, too tired to protest, I do as directed, my feet in the gutter. "Talk."_

_But I don't know where to start. Finally, I offer him the same non-explanation I gave my mother. "I hurt Bella, and she can't forgive me."_

"_Should she?"_

_I lift surprised eyes to him, and he's watching me carefully. I want, so badly, to be able to say yes, but honestly, I'm not sure. If I were just her friend and some other prick had done to her what I've done, would I tell her to forgive him or to cut her losses? The truth I don't want to acknowledge is obvious, and if possible, only makes me feel worse. "Probably not."_

"_Edward, what you have to remember is that an isolated action doesn't dictate character. Making a mistake doesn't make you a bad person. The difficult thing is living with the consequences, which is the responsibility we all have for the choices we make." I'm turning that over in my mind when he speaks again, his voice gentle. "Son, I've made a million mistakes with your mother. But she believes that, underneath my blunders, I'm a good man, and I'd do anything for her. That knowledge has let her forgive me for a lot of those mistakes."_

"_What was the worst one you ever made?" I challenge, knowing somehow that infidelity isn't anywhere on his list._

_He regards me carefully for a moment before unlooping the chest protector from around his neck and folding his hands in front of him, elbows propped on his knees. "This doesn't leave this conversation, understood?" I nod. He blows out a breath and gazes across the street at the blank face of an empty house. "I wasn't there when Emmett was born."_

"_What?"_

"_I arrived not long afterward, but I wasn't there when he was born. I missed your mother's labor, I missed the delivery…I missed everything. I was still a resident, and the hours were hellish, and I was paying my dues. Your mother had been on me while she was pregnant that I had to figure out a way to do both – build my career and build my family – but I just…thought the family part would just be there. That I didn't have to work as hard at it. Anyway, I was in the OR on a marathon surgery and I was ignoring her pages, and by the time I scrubbed out and got the message that she was actually in labor, she'd already delivered." I've never seen my father's face look so sad. "I missed the birth of my firstborn son, and I've regretted it every single day. And it took a long time for your mother to forgive me for it."_

"_But she did," I say quietly, and he nods._

"_She did." Finally, he turns to look at me. "Women are forgiving creatures, Edward. It's one of the things we should be most thankful for. Most of the time they want to love us, to forgive us, to let us atone for the ways we wrong them. It's one of God's true mercies." _

"_But aren't there some things that are unforgivable?"_

_His shrewd eyes are on my face, and I'm launching a concentrated effort not to squirm. "I'm afraid I'm going to need more information if you want an honest answer."_

_I chew on the inside of my cheek. "We were going slow," I say finally. "With the…physical stuff." I pick at the stitching on my mitt. "Slower than I would have liked." I glance up at him, expecting to see disapproval or censure, but his face is open. "But I was trying to be patient, because she's younger, and I love her, and I didn't want her to feel pressured." I tighten one of the laces along the thumb of my glove. "I was at a party she wasn't at, and a girl…sort of hit on me. And I didn't say no."_

_I hear my father sigh, and I feel six years old._

"_Adult decisions have adult consequences, son. It's one of the most difficult lessons to learn as you approach adulthood." His voice is fatalistic, and I can hear what he doesn't say – women may be inclined to forgive, but some transgressions are unforgivable. "Edward, you and Bella have been close since you were tiny. But perhaps this happened for a reason. Perhaps you needed this to see that you were growing differently – at different speeds, and perhaps in different directions."_

"_But I don't want this to be it," I say, unable to hide the tremble in my voice. _

"_I know," my dad says, his voice gently understanding, and once again, I want to lose myself in the comforting assurance of my parents' arms. I resist, though, running a thumb over the webbed pocket of the worn leather glove in my lap, blinking furiously against the sting in my eyes. "But son, unfortunately, things in life have a way of ending before we're ready for them to. Life has a way of shoving us into the next phase, whether we're ready to move forward or not." When I don't say anything, my dad continues. "You have a scholarship offer from UIC. Is that something you'd even consider if you were still with Bella and she had another year of school left here?" I don't answer, but I don't have to – there's no way I'd willingly go to school 2,000 miles away from her if she were still mine. I know it, and so does my father. "Life doesn't always ask us what we want, Edward. Perhaps this happened because it's time for you to move forward."_

"_But what about Bella?"_

_My father's smile is sad, and I can see the answer he's too kind to say aloud: that what happens to Bella is no longer my concern._

. . .


	39. Image

_**March 17, 2013 – Reflection Day.**_

_**March 18, 2013 – Word Prompt: Image. **_

. . .

_Dear Bella,_

_Thank you for your letter. I've been reading it and rereading it for days, and I feel like there's so much in it that I still haven't really wrapped my mind around. There's no doubt you're in the right profession – your words, even when they make me feel an inch tall, are beautiful._

_First and foremost, I'm sorry. Again. Always. I know you're tired of hearing it, and I sort of feel like a broken record, but I am. For what happened, but perhaps even more for how it's made you feel. I'm sorry your first time wasn't special. I'm sorry that my impatience made it impossible for you to share that experience with me. For equal parts selfish and selfless reasons, I'm sorry it wasn't with me, and I always will be._

_Here's what they don't tell guys about losing their virginity – and by "they," I mean everyone: the media, the so-called role models, the older guys, the peers – it matters. It matters who, it matters when, it matters where. For guys, there's so much focus placed on losing it that hardly any importance is placed on the details. Nobody talks about the fact that it would mean so much more if you did it with someone whose eyes you wanted to stare into all night long afterward. Someone you wanted to wrap up in your arms and feel your hearts slow together at the same speed. Someone with whom it wouldn't matter that it was embarrassing or uncomfortable or awkward, because you'd be so consumed by the love that everything else would just fade into the background. Someone you'd want to go slowly with, because even though your body might be screaming at you, nothing in the world could matter more than not wanting to hurt her. _

_Nobody tells guys about that part of it – that those things matter, and that they're worth waiting for._

_I've screwed up a lot in my life, Bella, but if I could go back and change just one, it would be that: I would have waited. For you. For us. You were worth waiting for. If I had it to do over again, I'd wait forever. You certainly don't owe me any apologies for not being ready. I let you down, and that's the simple truth of it. I should have waited. I should have been more patient. I should have done a lot of things that I didn't do, and that's on me. Not you. I'm so, so, so sorry. For all of it._

_I admit, though, to being relieved that you truly know that I regret what happened with Rosalie. I regretted it immediately, and I've regretted it every day since, and I never realized how much it mattered to me that you genuinely knew that until you acknowledged it. So thank you for that._

_And there's a part of me that will always be the eighteen-year-old boy who hurt you. Who was careless with what mattered most to him and lost it as a result. I'll always carry with me more than a little bit of that guilt, that self-disgust, that pain. Part of me will always be the eighteen-year-old who let down the most important person in his life._

_And part of me will always be the eighteen-year-old who loves you. No matter what._

I can't bring myself to sign it "your friend," but I don't want to shove the word "love" at her twice in two lines, so I end it with just my name, folding it without rereading it and slipping it into the envelope waiting at my elbow.

. . .

_It's been over a month, and it still hurts. But I'm trying to take my father's advice to heart, trying not to wallow in self-pitying misery. I try to live, try to accept the responsibility for my actions like a man, even as I watch Bella for the smallest indication that she might be softening, for the tiniest hint of a thaw._

_It doesn't come._

_Other things do: the end of baseball season, my acceptance of the scholarship offer from UIC, senior prom. I don't go with a date, because I can't stomach the idea of a night beside a girl who isn't Bella, a night dancing with a girl who isn't Bella, an image like the one that still hangs in my bedroom, but which would feature a girl who isn't Bella. I tag along with my friends, single and trying desperately not to feel like a loser – not because I'm going stag, but because the girl I want isn't with me. The dance itself passes in a blur of bad music, bad food, and bad fashion choices, and when Ben and Mike suggest an ice cream stop on the way home, I agree, if only because they've been good sports about letting me tag along all night._

_The moment I step through the glass doors of Ben & Jerry's, my entire body warms despite the chilly interior. Because there, standing and staring at me in pajama pants with ducks on them and a Forks SPCA t-shirt and looking a thousand times more beautiful than any of the girls in fancy dresses I've been surrounded by all night, is Bella. She gazes at me for a minute, eyes unreadable, and a million scenarios race through my mind: me apologizing for the millionth time and her, finally, mercifully, forgiving me; me offering to buy her ice cream and us starting over, like two high schoolers who just met instead of two kids whose lives are so intertwined that we can't find the individual threads; her crying and yelling at me, and me taking it, just grateful for any words she wants to throw at me._

_But instead, she turns away and mumbles something to Alice, and they turn and make their way toward the door, Alice's tiny body between Bella's and mine like a laughably small shield._

"_Hi, Bella," I try, desperate for her to look at me again, desperate for anything besides this cold, standoffish stranger of a girl, but she replies with a simple "Hey" without even looking at me and then she's gone._

_And I finally admit the truth I've been trying to deny for what feels like ages: it's over._

_Then graduation comes, and she isn't in the crowd, and the truth is absolute._

_I let myself get drunk again, this time because I'm a coward: I need to see her, to talk to her, and I don't have the courage to do it sober. And I learn another life lesson: that there are pains in the world that even the strength of liquor can't numb._

_I tell her she's beautiful, and it only makes her look sadder._

_My traitorous eyes scan her body, and she hides herself from me with an irritation she never had before._

_I tell her I love her, and for the first time ever, she doesn't say it back._

_She cries, and yells, and cries some more, and every tear, every sob, every word she lobs at me in that thick, heartbroken voice is like a dagger running me through._

_She tells me she hates me, that she'll never forgive me, and I wonder if she can tell that I'm crying, too, as my mother leads me away from her._

_And through the windshield, I watch her, not-my Bella, hazy through my own tears, standing with her dad, her shoulders rounded in pain._

_And I say goodbye._

. . .


	40. Discipline

**A/N: This one's a little short, as is the next, so I'm going to post them both today. Thanks, as always, for reading. Happy Tuesday! xo**

. . .

_**March 19, 2013 – Word Prompt: Discipline. Plot Generator—Idea Completion: A picture is worth a thousand words.**_

. . .

It takes all of the self-discipline I possess not to call her as soon as I know for sure my letter has been delivered. When my phone rings nine days after I mail it, I'm elbow-deep in a box of dusty books, and the thought that it might be Bella doesn't occur to me until I see her name on the glowing screen.

"Hi," I say, wiping my hands on my jeans.

"I got your letter." No hello, and a tiny coil of fear curls its way around my heart.

_You pushed,_ it says, tightening around the suddenly-pounding organ. _You pushed when you promised you wouldn't, and it's going to cost you._

"Oh." A coward's response. How fitting.

"Edward…" She trails off, and I wonder what goodbye will sound like when she says it aloud. I lean against the wall for support, my shoulder blades pressing into the cold plaster, waiting. Finally, I hear a soft sigh. "Thank you. It was…a good letter."

_Good letter. Not goodbye. Not yet._

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I…" She trails off, and I force myself to straighten. To stand like a man instead of slumping like a boy.

"What?"

"I like that we're…being honest with each other."

"Me too."

"It's almost like…"

"Like when we were friends."

Another audible breath. "Yeah. Like when we were friends."

"Yeah." When she doesn't deposit any more words into the silence between us, I offer some of my own. "Hey, Bella?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you think maybe…that's what happened? Where it went wrong?"

"What?"

"Loving each other. Maybe…it broke because we stopped being honest."

Silence for a while, but I can hear her breathing, and it doesn't fill me with anxious dread the way it once did. If anything, I'm coming to find her wordless company almost as comforting as her words. "Maybe." I lapse into a silence of my own, and finally she speaks again. "Or maybe we just…grew differently."

I flash back to my father's words. "Maybe."

"Maybe that was what was supposed to happen. If you hadn't gone to Chicago, you might not have been an All-American, and if I hadn't come to California, I might never have published anything."

"I'd have traded All-American for the chance to never have hurt you." She has no answer for that. She doesn't reciprocate, say she'd trade her success for never having lost me, and I'm surprised to realize I don't want her to.

Finally: "Alice sent me a picture of the wedding. It looked…nice."

"It was. Was it the one with the sunset?"

"Yeah."

It's the same photo I have on my shelf, but I remember the second one my mother sent with it: three perfectly-matched pairs, plus one. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but that one only painted one: _alone._ It was in panoramic Technicolor, but it was a solitary, single word all the same.

. . .

_I'm a freshman again, low man on the totem pole in a strange city 2,000 miles from home, and the distance is a relief as well as its own sweet ache. I don't see Bella's ghost in the passenger seat of my car, standing beside my locker door, sitting next to me on the sofa. But I also don't see Bella, and the absence of her makes my mind run amok with wondering. Is she dating anyone? Is she still hurting? Does she still hate me? Is she applying to colleges? Has she written anything new? Does she miss me the way I miss her: with a sharp ache that never seems to dull, the kind of ever-present sadness that wakes me in the middle of the night with the same sense of foreboding as a 3 a.m. phone call?_

_My roommate is another baseball recruit, and I return to our room more times than I care to count the first semester to see an athletic sock dangling from the door handle. When he asks why I never hook up despite the presence of a few girls who have made their interest rather apparent, I don't know how to explain my borderline visceral aversion to casual sex. Instead, I shrug and make something up about wanting to focus on school and baseball. I'm the freshman monk with the playboy roommate, and I find myself spending more nights in the library study lounge than anywhere else._

_And despite a lifetime of memories of Bella, the one that I can't stop seeing when I close my eyes is of her, illuminated by headlights, posture hunched as tears slick silver over her cheeks._

. . .


	41. Petition, Ambition, Repetition

_**March 20, 2013 – Word prompts: Petition, ambition, repetition**_

. . .

This time, I'm the one who's out of breath when I answer the phone, and I swipe at the sweat on my forehead with the shoulder of my t-shirt sleeve. "Are we still on for this weekend?" I ask after hello, draping the white gym towel over my shoulder and stepping away from the free weights. Emmett's watching his form in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and he's already done so many repetitions that I've done a full circuit before he's moved on to the next exercise.

"Sure. How do you feel about Thai food?"

"I've never had it."

"Seriously? Okay. Then we're definitely doing Thai. You don't have any gastrointestinal issues that I'm unaware of, do you?"

I laugh, and she does as well, and it feels better than I could have imagined, to laugh with her again. "No."

"Okay." A pause, then, "Did I catch you at a bad time?"

"No. Why?"

"You were breathless."

"Oh. I'm at the gym."

"Oh." Another pause. "Still doing free weights?"

And I remember the sorry excuse for a weight room off the back of the Forks High School gymnasium, and a girl in sneakers and a sweater sitting backward on an empty weight bench, watching with an unreadable expression as I pushed dumbbells toward the ceiling in preparation for baseball season, ambition my own personal steroid. "Yep," I reply, retrieving my water bottle from a bench near the water fountains, recalling that same girl in a loose gray Forks High gym shirt and sweatpants, shying away from the action, back pressed to the cinderblock gymnasium wall. "You still avoiding anything remotely resembling exercise?"

A short chuckle. "Nah. I do yoga now." I'm treated to visions of her pretzeling her body into ridiculous postures, and the sip of water catches in my throat. As I cough, I hear her protesting. "Come on, I know I was uncoordinated but there's no need to _guffaw_ at me."

When I can speak again, I shake my head. "I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the word 'guffaw' in conversation before." I think that was pretty good, considering I'm still being assaulted by images of Bella doing downward dog.

And the realization strikes yet again: for all I've missed the girl she was, I'm equally intrigued by the woman she is. And for the first time, I consider the fact that, even if we had no shared history, even if she were just a girl I met in a Seattle bar, I'd still want her. It's a realization I don't quite know what to do with.

. . .

"_Hey! You! Baseball player!" I turn, and for a split second, my heart catches in my throat. Brown hair with highlights that glow amber in the sunlight. Brown eyes like deep pools of chocolate I could swim in. A faint constellation of freckles across the bridge of the nose. A full bottom lip. _

_But then the differences catch up with the similarities and bring me back to reality: a UIC cross-country tank top that shows a hint of cleavage; cut-off shorts that show toned, athletic legs; fingernails painted the color of lemons. "Edward, right?" The girl grins, and despite its differences, the similarities ignite a familiar warmth low in my chest. I wish I could remember the last time Bella had smiled at me like that: full-wattage, uninhibited, open. _

"_Yeah. Sorry, I don't…"_

"_Kelly. I run cross-country." She gestures toward the tank top before holding a clipboard out toward me. "I'm collecting signatures."_

_I glance down at the list before me. "For what?"_

"_We're petitioning the university for a more prevalent police presence on campus."_

"_Why?"_

"_Did you know there have been eleven sexual assaults against female students since the beginning of the semester? And that's just the ones that were reported. We're hoping that the petition will draw the administration's focus to the need for tighter security measures and more options for female students who are out and about on campus alone at night."_

_I shrug and reach for her pen. "Okay." Another grin, and I feel a flicker of satisfaction as I scrawl my name before handing it back. _

"_Thanks," Kelly says, accepting the clipboard and hugging it to her chest. "Hey, how come I never see you at the baseball team's parties?"_

_I shake my head, the true answer buried beneath a mountain of regret in my chest. "I'm not much of a party guy." An abbreviated truth._

"_Yeah, it's not really my scene, either. My roommate always goes; I sort of tag along just to meet people, but they're not really much good for that."_

"_Yeah, not really." I watch as she hugs the clipboard to her chest. "Well, see ya."_

_A flash of disappointment in the brown eyes makes them even more familiar, and the words rise in my mind unbidden as I turn away: that I'm doing her a favor. That disappointment, as it turns out, is what I do best._

. . .


	42. Clarity

_**March 21, 2013 – Word Prompt: Clarity. **_

. . .

_I can picture her here._

It's the first thought that strikes me when my rental car noses its way through the streets of San Francisco, toward the address I plugged into the GPS when I left Sacramento. I can see Bella walking along these sidewalks, hopping on the MUNI or the BART. I see a young woman with a knitted hat walking a chocolate lab, and I remember the sound of a dog's bark in the background of our phone calls; suddenly, I envision Bella, dark hair dancing on the cool breeze, red leash in her mittened hand.

I picture her walking through the fog, coming closer and slowly, steadily, back into clarity.

As I navigate the streets, trying to focus on finding street signs instead of picturing Bella's life here, my mind flits back to our last conversation before the brief one outlining the logistics of our un-date: her suggestion that maybe things were supposed to happen the way they did, that I was meant to go to Chicago and she was meant to come here. I don't know about the former, but being here, in her city, in her world, I can't deny the truth of the latter.

I picture her heels clacking against the pavement as she walks to her car after meeting her editor; I imagine her date knocking on her door when we're on the phone, and her opening it in a swirl of dark hair and faint perfume and friendly smiles. I try to see all of these little details of her life – all of the tiny little facets of her present – and the knowledge that I don't really know anything in detail only highlights the truth: I'm pretty firmly in her past.

I like to think I've learned a lot in the years since I was eighteen and careless, but there's one thing I've learned that I think a lot of people spend years and even lifetimes figuring out: that letting go is something you do in a thousand little ways, in a million tiny gestures.

First, you loosen your grip.

Then, you uncurl your fingers.

You pull your hands away.

You let your arms drop to your sides.

You straighten your posture, force yourself not to lean forward.

You make yourself stand still despite the fact that every cell in your body is screaming at you to give chase.

And you watch whatever it is exit your life, one step at a time.

It doesn't occur to me until I'm the not-quite-date knocking on her door, until she opens her door to _me_ in a whirl of dark hair and faint perfume and a friendly smile, that just because you let something go once doesn't mean you never get to hold it again.

"Hi," she says, and she's so Bella and so not-Bella at the same time that my heart is heavy with joy and nostalgia.

"Hi." And for what feels like the first time in years, I smile.

. . .

_Bella doesn't see me right away. It's my first trip home since I left in August, the first time I'm seeing her since she yelled at me in the dark on her front lawn, and I'm struck by the changes. Gone are the rounded shoulders, the wounded eyes, the downturned mouth; she stands, straight-spined, laughing at something Cora says as she hands over her bill and some cash. As she waits for her change, I hear Cora ask about colleges._

"_UCLA, Berkeley, USC, and U-Dub," Bella says, opening the zippered pouch of her wallet to deposit her coins._

"_Nothing out east?" Cora asks, pushing the register drawer shut with a ping._

_Bella pauses only momentarily. "No. I like it here."_

"_Well, I'm sure your dad will love having you close." She smiles, and I've always liked Cora._

_When Bella turns, she nearly runs into me; I'm already at the register, sent with orders from my mother to pick up a chocolate cream pie. "Sorry," she says before she looks up; when she does, her eyes widen, then harden._

"_It's okay," I say, and the discrepancy steamrolls me – of the two of us, she isn't the one who owes the apologies. The look she gives me tells me that her thoughts have wandered the same path. As she sidesteps me, her shoulders hunch and she drops her gaze. "Bella," I try as she hurries toward the door, but the bell jingles and she disappears into the cold without turning back. I want to chase after her, but Cora has spotted me._

"_Edward! Welcome back! How are you liking college?" I turn, make the polite chitchat while I wait for my pie, and by the time I get out to the parking lot, there's no trace of her. There's a fine layer of snow coating the lot, and tiny flakes drift from the sky despite the sun. The light illuminates them, and I feel as though I'm standing in a swirl of a thousand glittering diamond filaments. _

_I don't know if it's wafting from the diner or if it's a sensory memory, but for the first time in ages, I can almost taste hot chocolate on my tongue._

. . .


	43. Wine

**A/N: YIKES. So I went away for four days with my family. To a place with no WiFi and no cell service. I don't remember 1987, but I imagine it was probably a lot like this weekend. Anyway, my deepest apologies for the delay in updates...I'm posting this with a tiny human trying to grab my keyboard, but I'm hoping to post again later today. Happy belated Mother's Day to all the moms out there - traditional, non-traditional, single, adoptive, step, surrogate...all of them. You are all superheroes. xo**

. . .

**March 22, 2013 – Word Prompt: Wine. Dialogue flex: "Do you remember this song?"**

**. . .**

"I'm sorry," she says for the third time, and I shake my head. To be honest, I'm faintly relieved that the Thai restaurant was closed due to illness; something tells me that had it been open, I likely would have spent the rest of the night feeling ill.

"Bella, stop. This is perfect." And it is. A small Italian bistro a block from the barricaded Thai restaurant, the candle between us lighting her features lovely. A tiny table, small enough to reach her hand across. A dinner for lovers. Even if she is still making noise about picking up the check.

The white linen tablecloth is pristine, and it feels like a blank canvas.

A brief silence, and then a waiter appears to take our drink orders. "Do you…" She pauses, but in her hand is the leather-bound wine list.

"Sure," I say, wondering if our shared shorthand means something still.

"White or red?"

"Either."

She orders a bottle of pinot noir, and it occurs to me that I've never seen her drink before.

_She likes red wine. _It's the first revelation into adult Bella, and I realize I'm hoarding details like diamonds, seeking insight by way of breadcrumbs. When the server returns with a carafe, pouring a taster into her glass, I watch as she lifts it to her lips and takes a small sip before nodding in approval.

And it's that small, simple thing that hits the truth home: the girl I loved became a woman, and I missed it.

Our glasses filled, the server launches into a spiel about specials. She watches him; I watch her. So the same, and so very different. So old Bella, and so new Bella. The girl and the woman, and what I'd give to be allowed to love them both.

"Thank you," she's saying, and the waiter retreats.

"The salmon sounded really good," she says, and because I couldn't recite a single special under threat of death, I simply nod.

She chews her lip – _old Bella_ – and runs the chain of her necklace through her fingers –_ new Bella_ – and she's just opening her mouth to speak when a voice cuts through our bubble.

"Bella?"

She half-turns, and a warm smile splits her face. "Alex! Hi!" Rising from the table, she drops her linen napkin at her place and takes a step away, leaving me with her napkin and her lip gloss-smeared wineglass, and I try not to feel the symbolism of being left behind, if only momentarily. "What are you doing here?"

"Business dinner," he says, eyeing me with a little too much curiosity to be indifferent. "And you?"

"Having dinner with a friend," she says easily, and she didn't even hesitate with the word. Long, beautiful hand held out in my direction. "Alex Lydell, this is Edward Cullen, a friend of mine from home. Edward, this is Alex."

I rise. Shake hands. Act like her friend, even if it feels like a lie. I don't miss the way his eyes widen slightly and flicker back to her before resettling on me when she says my name. It was a flicker of surprised recognition, and I know without asking that he's heard it before. It isn't lost on me that she didn't qualify who Alex was in our introduction, and there's only one reason for that that I can imagine: they've dated.

"Good to meet you," he's saying, hand out for a handshake, and I accept it.

"Likewise." He's tall and dark-haired and well-dressed and I can't help wondering if she ever told him she loved him.

Polite goodbyes, and we're back at our table. "An ex?" I ask, and she doesn't blush, doesn't look embarrassed. _New Bella._

"An ex," she confirms. Her response is light, easy, uncomplicated. There's no drama there. No bitterness. No complicated back story. Absently, I wonder if he's the guy from her freshman year, but I push the thought away, choosing instead to focus on the bigger question swirling around my mind.

"What do you think it would have been like?"

A small crease between her fine brows. "What?"

"If we had stayed friends?"

A measured sip of her wine, fingers playing with the stem. "Friends who never dated, or friends who broke up amicably?"

"Is there a difference?" It's not a rhetorical question; I'm genuinely curious.

"I don't know."

I don't either. Having loved her, I can't remember what it felt like not to. I can't picture being a guy who could watch her have a boyfriend or kiss someone else or love someone else and not be jealous. As I pick through my memories, I wonder if I loved her long before I ever admitted it; I wonder if I loved her all along.

"I'm sure it would have been complicated eventually," she says at last.

"Why?"

"Because even if you'd never kissed me, I always would have wondered what it might have been like if you had."

I remember that moment, that blanket fort, the exhilarating rush when I finally pressed my lips to hers. Remember how disoriented I felt, feeling like the Bella I'd always known had become someone completely different. And now, she's done it again.

"Do you remember this song?"

So busy dissecting the nuances of our failed relationship, it takes me a minute to pick out the faint strains of a piano melody spilling from near the back corner of the restaurant. After a few more bars, I place it as one of the many songs we danced to at that homecoming dance long ago.

"Yeah." And I do. I remember everything. And for the first time in years, it feels something other than painful.

. . .

_Next year, I'm going to Cancun. Or Key West. Or wherever it is the guys who don't go home opt to spend the holidays. Nothing good ever comes from returning to Forks. Two years ago, after seeing Bella for a matter of moments in the Forks Diner, the rest of the break was a maudlin mix of hoping to see her again and dreading the look on her face. Top it off with a healthy dose of self-loathing, and it was a real hoot. Last year, I spent the entire break wondering about her but too chickenshit to ask about her or to attempt to see her, so I went back to school agitated and anxious. And, of course, depressed._

_This year, Rosalie Hale makes a reappearance two days before Christmas. On Emmett's arm, no less. She watches me warily, and I try not to look at her at all. On Christmas Eve, Emmett corners me in the kitchen._

"_Rosie told me." I don't look up from the dishes I'm washing, but tension coils in my spine. When I say nothing, he opts to clarify. "About high school." I still don't look up. "Why didn't you tell me?"_

_At this, I do look up. I owe a lot of apologies for that particular mistake, but I don't owe any of them to Emmett. "Why would I?" I ask, my voice sharp. "I didn't realize you were going to date her."_

_There's a flash of irritation before Emmett reverts to his typically easygoing good nature. "I meant as your brother. Not as Rosalie's potential future boyfriend." He must register my confusion. "When you and Bella broke up, I know you were messed up about it. I didn't realize…what had happened."_

"_Yeah, well. It wasn't my finest moment. Not something I wanted to relive too many times." I rinse suds off the dinner plate in my hands. "I'm surprised she told you."_

"_I like her a lot," he says, even as the something-new in his eyes hints that his words aren't quite the whole truth. "I think she feels the same way, so I guess she figured honesty was called for." When I say nothing, he sighs, and I feel so much like the disappointing little brother that I want to throw the glass I'm soaping up. "I just…didn't know if it was going to be a problem."_

Me fucking your girlfriend? _I want to ask, but even in the moment, I know Emmett's not the one I'm angry with. "Not a problem," I say as smoothly as I can manage, water rinsing the glass clean._

"_Really?" he asks, dark gaze penetrating, and I've never been able to bullshit Emmett, even when we were kids, and I was trying to hide my Halloween candy stash by telling him it was all gone. I don't reply, and he sighs. "Edward, talk to me."_

"_I screwed up, okay? Big-time. And it cost me Bella. Rose was the other player, but she was incidental. I fucked up, and I hurt Bella. And I paid for it." Still paying for it, I say silently, but don't want to admit aloud. Still being so screwed up over someone who hates me is depressingly pathetic. "But I don't have any weird feelings for Rosalie, so if she's what gets your motor revving, have at it."_

"_Hey. A little respect," he says, voice gentle despite the censure of the words. _

_I sigh, suddenly exhausted. "It's fine, Em. We're good. You and me, you and Rosalie…it's all good. Bygones, or whatever."_

_So fitting, really, that part of that word is "gone." _

_It has never felt more true. Or more like a lie._

. . .


	44. Limit

**A/N: Both kids sleeping at the same time? Must be all that fresh air! Another chapter...it's a short one. (TWSS.) Happy Monday, if there is such a thing! And happiest of belated birthday wishes to abadkitty, whose awesomeness knows no bounds. xo**

. . .

**March 23, 2013 – Word Prompt: Limit. **

. . .

"I'll be fine," I say, because my head may be swimming, but it isn't from the wine. I'm high off her company, drunk on her presence, and it's a buzz I want to bask in.

"Please, Edward. I'll worry, otherwise." Earnest brown eyes, and a lot may have changed, but not that. A spike of hope – stupid, because her not wanting me to wrap my rental car around a telephone pole doesn't mean she loves me again. Still, maybe someday it'll be enough that she just likes me again.

But this – I don't know that I can sleep on her sofa. Be that close and that far and not yearn the whole night through. I don't want the reminder of darker things to chip away at the new light that a few hours of her simple, forgiving presence has bought me.

"Please," she says again, and I can't bring myself to disappoint her even in the smallest way.

"I really doubt I'm even near the legal limit," I say, even as I'm following her up the stairs to her front door. Watching her calves in front of me, the slender ankles that taper into a pair of heels. Considerably taller than the almost-heels from homecoming years ago, but not slutty-tall. Elegant-tall.

Grown-up-Bella-tall.

She slides her key into the lock, and I've been here before. Been standing behind a woman, waiting to gain entry. This time, sex isn't on the table, and yet the nerves swimming in my stomach, the heady mix of anticipation and anxiety swirling through my blood rivals any past dalliance. I'm more excited about sleeping on Bella's sofa than I've ever been about sex with anyone else, and the thought would be faintly amusing if it weren't so damn sad.

"Home sweet home," she says, pushing the door open and reaching to the wall to flip a light switch. A golden retriever appears, tail wagging lazily, and she bends to pet its head. "Hey, Sammy. Good boy." The dog eyes me warily. "This is Edward," she says, as if he's a child and not a dog, and when she looks to me expectantly, I bend at the waist, petting his soft head.

"Nice to meet you, Sammy."

Because this time, I'm going to follow her lead. And when I see her beatific smile, I realize: that's what I should have been doing all along.

. . .


	45. Panic

**March 24, 2013 – Reflection day.**

**March 25, 2013 – Word prompt: Panic. Plot Generator—Binding Blurb: In 500 words or fewer, write a short entry about "achieving victory."**

. . .

Bella's home is so very Bella that the minute I step inside, I never want to leave. She gives me a short but inclusive tour, conspicuously avoiding showing me her bedroom beyond a vague wave toward the ajar door. It isn't until she's vanished into the shower that I give the smaller details closer inspection.

White-painted built-in bookcases crawl up the walls on either side of a small fireplace that holds a display of pillar candles. I see some of the paperbacks I remember her reading in high school, plus a lot of new ones. Unsurprisingly, I don't see her own book.

Above the fireplace is a mantel with more candles and a few picture frames. The first photo is of Bella and Charlie standing on a dock, a big, silvery fish dangling between them. The second is of Bella and a woman I don't recognize but assume must be either a friend or her editor, based on her age. It's the third that brings me up short: Bella, Alice, and me. I don't think I've ever seen the photo – don't even remember it being taken, in fact – and it's odd, to see yourself in your younger flesh in a moment you can't recall. From the background, I can see that we're in the Forks High School parking lot. Alice is leaning against the hood of my car, smiling at the camera. I've got an arm slung casually around Bella's shoulders, grinning at whomever is taking the shot. I take a moment to consider my younger self: confident. Cocky. Relaxed. Happy. Like a guy who's got the world in his palm and can't imagine it might slip through his fingers.

When I look at Bella, my heart skitters unevenly in my chest. Because she isn't even looking at the camera. She's looking at me. And her love is so open in her face that it makes my insides twist.

_How could I have betrayed her_?

There's no missing her adoration, her admiration, her love. I had forgotten how she used to look at me – or, more likely, I was so used to it that, at the time, I didn't think to pay attention to it. But it's there. It's obvious. She loved the hell out of me. I close my eyes, trying to put myself back into the skin of that swaggering teenager, trying to remember what it felt like to look at Bella and see that love in her eyes, but I can't. It's hazy. I remember her smiling, laughing, kissing me, but I can't remember what her eyes looked like. Can't picture anything about her eyes back then, except the ones that were red-rimmed and filled with tears and hurt.

"Not much of a gallery." I'm pulled from my thoughts by Bella's voice, and I turn to find her watching me warily from the threshold where the living room gives way to the hallway. Her eyes are cautious-curious, wondering what insight I might have gleaned from her small collection of snapshots.

"Is this your agent?" I ask, gesturing at the second photo.

"Yeah. Sunny."

I arch a brow. "Sunny?"

"She grew up in the Haight. Her parents were flower children." She shrugs. "My yoga instructor's name is Rainbow."

I laugh. "So you're saying it could have been worse."

"I'm saying…welcome to San Francisco."

I grin and turn back to the photos. Try to pluck up the courage, but it's still hovering somewhere in my shoes. "You catch this?" Gesture to the fish.

"Not without a little help from Charlie," she says, stepping closer, and she smells like softness: some kind of lotion and some kind of flower and some kind of girl.

I nod, eyes darting back to the third photo. "First day of your senior year," she says quietly, answering the question I'm still too much of a coward to ask, and where did all that courage from the picture go? Answer: it's standing beside me, because she took it with her when she left.

"I don't even remember it being taken."

"Angela," she says. "Yearbook. She gave me a copy when I asked her for it."

"When did you ask her?" I don't know why that matters, or why I ask.

Suddenly, I can feel the heat of her eyes, and I turn my head. "The week before Rosalie."

I swallow. When I say nothing, she adds, "I dug it out while I was home. To remind me."

"Of what?" I'm proud of myself for asking, when the potential answers could cut so deeply.

_Of how it was._

_Of who you were._

_Of what we had._

All past tense.

"Of us," she says simply, dark eyes gazing at the photo.

_Present or past tense?_ I wonder but don't ask.

We stand in silence, staring at the younger, better versions of ourselves. Well, myself. I'm slowly learning that this older, newer, more mature version of Bella is even more alluring than the younger one. The difference is, this one scares the shit out of me; difference is, this time I'm smart enough to be aware of the power she holds over me.

When she speaks again, her voice is all gentleness, cotton over silk. "Would you like some hot chocolate?"

And as I turn to look at her, my heart cracks wide open.

. . .

_This time, the ceiling isn't spinning. The fabric beneath me is the smooth cotton of sheets instead of the rough upholstery of a sofa. I'm naked, as is the girl next to me, and I actually remember how we got that way. And I'm not panicking._

_She's nice. Kelly. The body of a cross-country runner, the smile of a girl I loved years ago. It was the smile that made me say yes. Yes to dinner, yes to a second date, a third, a fourth and more, yes to following her up the stairs to her apartment. Yes, I thought, to moving on. Letting go._

_The first time I had sex was a disaster; I had thought the second would be different. Going into it with my eyes open, with someone I actually liked and found interesting, I somehow thought it would feel like achieving victory, accomplishing growth. Instead, I just feel the thin thread of disappointment: after all this time, all this distance, I'm still drawing comparisons._

_The eyes: brown, but not as warm._

_The hair: brown, but not as soft._

_The smile: open, but not as kind._

_The kisses: nice, but not as sweet._

_The heart: kind, but not as mine._

_Still comparing. And after all this time, everything else still comes up short._

. . .


	46. Threat

**March 26, 2013 – Word prompt: Threat. Dialogue flex: "Are you always so competitive?" **

. . .

Back home, the four walls of my apartment seem colder, somehow. Dimmer. Emptier. The memory of Bella's warm, cozy apartment is bright in my mind, and I want to be back there already, despite having left it only hours earlier.

I'm sliding my phone out of my pocket and dialing her number before I even realize it. "Did you forget something?" I sort of love it, how she doesn't answer with hello.

"You should come to Seattle," I say without any preamble of my own.

She's quiet for a moment, treating me to the sound of her slow, even breaths. "Why?"

"Well, I know it's not quite as culturally diverse or even as exciting as San Francisco, but I'm sure we can show you a good time."

A beat of silence, then, "No, not why should I come. I mean…why do you want me to?"

This feels like a test, and I turn the question over in my mind, pick it apart, try to find the cogs that make it turn. "I want you in my life," I say finally, and when she's silent, I know it was sort of a cop-out answer.

"Why?" she asks, voice all soft, and it isn't lost on me that now she's the one pushing me.

I muster up the courage to say, "Because it isn't complete, otherwise."

More quiet. I wonder, as I wait, if we've spent more time listening to airwaves during these conversations than to each other. Keep waiting, my heart threatening to pound right out of my chest. Finally, I hear her exhale. "I told Charlie I'd come home for Easter. Maybe I can…detour. To you."

"Okay," I say immediately, too thrilled that it wasn't a no to feel even a shred of disappointment that she might still consider me nothing more than a detour. "That would be great."

"Edward, I should probably tell you something." There's a note of forewarning in her voice that I don't like, and I try not to let apprehension cloud my brief moment of anticipation.

"Okay."

"I have a date tomorrow night. A friend of a friend…it's sort of a setup. I agreed before your visit." When I don't say anything, she sighs. "I don't even know why I'm telling you. I just…felt like I should."

"Okay," I say, and it doesn't escape my notice that I've said that three times already.

Doesn't escape hers, either. "Please say something else."

"I'm not sure what to say," I tell her honestly, and I don't. I know how I feel – disappointed, irritated, dejected, _re_jected – but I don't have the right to feel any of those things. "I guess…have a good time?"

There's a beat of silence. Then, "Do you really want me to have a good time?"

"No," I say immediately. "I hope he's overweight and balding and has a hunchback. And halitosis. And that he's unemployed."

When she laughs, the knot in my chest loosens slightly. "Wow, how did you know exactly what my type is?"

I snort. "I know _exactly_ what your type is. Halitosis-hunchback doesn't stand a chance." But there's a thin thread of despair that her date will be none of those things; that instead, he'll be the one who captures her heart just as I feel like there's the tiniest chance I could make it mine again.

"You know my type, huh?" Her voice is teasing.

"You like baseball players. Tall ones. With superb math skills and sappy parents."

"Hmm. My friend said he bakes. I've always wanted to date a man who bakes." More teasing. Surely she wouldn't be teasing me if she were serious about dating some random guy, right?

I blow out a dismissive breath. "I make the best hot chocolate you've ever had. And any jackass can read a cookbook."

"Are you always so competitive?" Still laughing. Jesus, I missed her laugh.

"When it's important."

"Hm."

I don't know if the quiet that follows is just another way for her to tease me, but into it, I pour my courage. "Don't go."

"What?" The teasing is gone from her voice, replaced by a wary confusion.

"On the date. Don't go."

"Why?" Another test.

"Date me."

"You live in Seattle."

"I can love you from Seattle."

"Edward—"

"Sorry. Shouldn't have said 'love.'"

She's quiet again, and God, her quiet is going to be the death of me. But I will myself to be patient – my new promise to myself, where anything Bella is concerned. I don't follow up my Seattle comment with the truth: I would love her from anywhere.

. . .

_I've sort of gotten used to the pain of having lost Bella. I don't expect to hear from her anymore, don't expect our paths to cross when I go home to Forks, don't expect my mother to fill me in on the details of her life. My relationship with Bella has been pretty firmly relegated to the past, despite any feelings that may still linger in the present. Which is why I'm so taken aback when I return home after my junior year of college to see a small box on the bed in my childhood bedroom. When I peek inside, I see things that launch me right back to the place I thought I'd left behind._

_One of my old hooded sweatshirts._

_One of my movies._

_Three of my CDs._

_Two of my books._

_All things I'd lent to Bella, once upon a time. It seems an odd sort of kick, given the time that's passed, and when I ask my mother about it, she glances up at me before quickly returning her focus to the cookbook in front of her. "Charlie dropped it off last week. Said Bella had been going through her closet to give some clothes to Goodwill and came across an old box of your things. Thought you might want them back."_

"_Oh." _

_I realize, as the word leaves my lips, that I'd been hoping this was some sort of sign that she still felt something for me, even if it was anger. But the truth – that things she once loved of mine have since been banished to some dark corner at the back of her closet – is surprising in its pain. And when I retreat back to my room and pick up the sweatshirt, stupidly hoping that it smells a little bit like a happier time, I'm disappointed yet again._

_Because all it smells like is dust and desertion. Like something left behind long ago._

. . .


	47. Outsmart

**March 27, 2013 – Word prompts: Outsmart. **

. . .

"I didn't go." A week after our last conversation, and I've been avoiding calling her because I felt like, after our last talk, the ball was pretty squarely in her court. I've spent the past seven days imagining her going out with some tall, dark, good-looking guy wearing a baker's apron and brandishing a platter of cupcakes like a bouquet of flowers when he arrived on her doorstep, and those mental images combined with the lack of contact with her have made me irritable and sad. And yet, all of that dissipates when I hear her voice on the other end of the phone.

"Didn't go?"

"On the date. I didn't go."

And it's my turn to test. "Why not?"

"Because I didn't want to." Her voice is gentle, soft, beautiful.

I blow out a breath. As I pass the hall mirror, I realize I'm smiling. "Was it the threat of halitosis that did it or the hunchback?"

She laughs, quick and short, then sobers. "No. It was you."

I try to glean her meaning. Can't, so I ask, "What does that mean?"

"I thought about it after I got off the phone with you, and I realized that I just…didn't want to go." When I'm quiet, she sighs. "Edward, I don't know how I feel about dating you again. It still scares me. I'm not that girl I was when we were kids. But I meant what I said in my letter: I still have her in me. And she wouldn't survive being hurt by you a second time. That's the part of me that thinks maybe it would be better if we just…tried friendship instead."

My heart plummets. "Oh."

"But then I turn down dates with attractive, eligible men. Who bake." I don't say anything, because I don't know what she's expecting me to say to that. And really, it feels like she isn't really saying all of this for my sake. When she speaks again, her voice is small, an echo of the girl I broke. "Tell me you won't hurt me again."

"I won't," I say immediately, automatically, vehemently. "I won't, Bella, I swear I won't. I couldn't. It would destroy me, to hurt you."

"Me too."

I can't quell the tide of hope swelling and cresting behind my breastbone, a giddying twister of anticipation I've never felt before. "Is that…are you saying yes?"

_Please, please, God, let her be saying yes._

"To a date. I'm saying yes to a date."

And I'm grinning into the middle distance, another crack in my heart, another crack in our fractured history sealing itself together.

"I'll take it."

. . .

_I didn't expect to wind up back in Forks after graduating from college, but I have three months to kill before I start law school. The town, always small, feels even smaller now. I look at the backdrop of my first eighteen years and, for the first time in my life, it seems almost foreign. I look at my bedroom, and at the pictures I left behind of a younger me, cocksure and arrogant, thinking he could outsmart the world, and he seems like a stranger. For the first time, I realize the truth: I outgrew Forks. I outgrew my hometown, my childhood, my past. There's so much that I shed when I shed the skin of my childhood, and when I look back over the discards, there's really only one thing I regret leaving behind._

_I think about the things I kept, and they're few: My family. My passion. My regret._

_I wish I could find a way to trade the regret for the girl who put it there._

_My first morning home, I open the cupboard above the stove to find a familiar canister of cocoa powder, and I'm momentarily struck dumb. After a beat to regain my composure, I push it aside in favor of the coffee lurking behind it and try not to read the symbolism written in the choice._

. . .


	48. Regret

**March 28, 2013 – Word prompt: Regret. Audio-visual challenge—Imagined image: (tunnel of love)**

. . .

So used to Bella's phone calls, it always takes me faintly by surprise when my phone rings at night and it's someone other than her. "Edward?" My mother's voice holds an unmissable note of despair, and my heart clenches, thinking of all the different ways the next words out of her mouth could hurt.

"Mom?"

"Edward, honey." She doesn't say anything more, and for a brief, fleeting moment, I don't want her to. I want to exist in the bubble of blissful ignorance that I can already sense is about to be shattered. "Honey, Charlie Swan's been shot."

"What?"

"He was brought into the hospital tonight; Carlisle called from the ER. He's being airlifted to Harborview." A brief spark of relief at the revelation that he's still alive, at least. "I just…thought you would want to know." The hesitation is there, the uncertainty my mother always has when Bella enters the conversation; she doesn't know that where her name once speared me through the heart, now it patches the wounds.

"Does Bella know?"

"Alice said she's getting on a flight to Seattle."

A hasty goodbye, and I'm dialing Alice, who answers midway through the first ring. "United, flight 1243 out of SFO. Should land at about ten past nine."

"Who's picking her up?" I ask, wanting more than anything for it to be me.

"I am," she says. "But I suspect I'll have company."

"I can pick you up at 8:30."

"Okay."

That settled, I try Bella, but I get her voice mail. Glancing at my watch, I realize she's likely already in the air. My mind briefly pictures it: her passenger jet and Charlie's medivac helicopter flying toward each other through the dark night sky. An immediate pang of remorse spears me; of all the regrets I have about the way things ended with Bella, somewhere in the middle of that list is the way I disappointed Charlie. Silently, I pray that I'll have the chance to earn his forgiveness, too.

Ninety minutes to kill, and I don't know what to do with them. The textbook I'd been studying sits abandoned on the coffee table, a cup of coffee growing cold beside it. A yellow pool of light spills into the room from the lamp on the end table, and the silence inside these four walls is its own sound.

Restless, anxious, nervous. Wondering at the worst: who will be the man in Bella's life, if Charlie doesn't come back to her? I hope I don't get an answer to that question, as memories of Bella's dark eyes in another face come to my mind, the unconditional love and unwavering protectiveness in them things I'd naively thought I could replicate.

I'm on Alice's doorstep by 8:00; we're standing in the arrivals area of Sea-Tac a full twenty minutes before Bella's plane is scheduled to land. Her arm slips through mine, and for the first time ever, I feel like we're on the same page where Bella's concerned. Despite her fear, her pain, her anger, there was some part of Bella, I suspect, that was open to finding a reason to forgive me. Alice suffered no such compulsion.

When Bella's face appears behind a cluster of travelers wearily making their way out of the gate area, my throat constricts. She looks beautiful. Haggard, exhausted, panicked, grief-stricken, painfully beautiful. Her tiny frame weaves its way around people, head down and posture hunched, black straps of her backpack like an ineffectual harness trying to hold her back by the shoulders. When she lifts her gaze to scan for Alice and sees me, that beautiful face crumples. And with it, my heart.

. . .

_I like Seattle. It's close enough to home that I no longer feel like I'm running from it but far enough away that I don't feel defined by it. It's a city big enough to lose yourself but small enough to find yourself, and I do both in equal measure. Law school is just hard enough to keep most of my brain occupied, and the weather is such that I remember what it means to appreciate the simple pleasure of sunshine. Here, finally, I work on becoming a man. Not a boy, and not some in-between imitation of a man forged by the illusion of independence that college affords, but a man who knows who he is and what he wants._

_The latter has always been a foregone conclusion, even long after its impossibility became clear, but I work on redefining it. The former is a work in progress._

_When my parents announce in my second year that they're renewing their vows, I take it in stride. My parents' love has always been front-and-center; they're the couple that is constantly embarrassing their kids with overly demonstrative displays of affection and borderline inappropriate innuendos in the kitchen. I try to pretend to be embarrassed by it instead of envious, but sometimes when I look at them I think of Charlie Swan, and the way he never even dated after Bella's mom left. I think about my brothers and their happy love lives, and I try desperately not to feel like the Charlie to their Carlisle-and-Esmes._

_I try to imagine what my future happiness might look like, and I try not to let it hurt when I can't stop brown eyes from invading the pictures. Six years, and it isn't lost on me that Renee Swan has been gone for twelve._

_And I may not know much, but I know I don't have the strength for six more years of hurt in me._

. . .


	49. Shower

**March 29, 2013 – Word prompt: Shower. Plot Generator—Phrase Catch: Back to normal.**

. . .

It took me six years and then some to find my way back to Bella.

It takes Charlie Swan seventy-six hours.

I guess I have a lot to learn about unconditional love.

After tearful hugs and kisses, reassurances that he'll be okay, a day of listening to doctors' reports, surgical summaries, recovery prospects, long-term prognoses, Charlie orders Bella back to Forks under the guise of getting him some of "his things." But I see what he notices when she isn't looking: the dark circles under her eyes, the bone-deep weariness that has settled into her slight frame, the gauntness of her face that belies the fact that she hasn't eaten anything more substantial than coffee in days. When he suggests that I drive her, I don't miss the look in his dark eyes: warning, pleading, trusting.

All these years later, we're still speaking the same language.

I'm opening the passenger door of my car when it happens: she breaks. Great, heaving, body-racking sobs that shake her entire frame and transport me to a moonlit yard years ago and a crying girl illuminated by headlamps. The difference is, this time, I reach for her and she comes willingly into the circle of my arms.

"It's okay, Bella. He's going to be okay." I press my mouth to the crown of her head, breathing in the scent of her, all traces of shampoo or perfume eradicated by the undeniable scent of hospital. I feel small hands clutching the fabric of my coat at my lower back, and I tighten my grip, content to hold her for as long as she'll let me. And as I murmur, "Everything's going to be okay" into her hair and feel her hold on me tighten, I'm relieved to find that I believe my own words.

She's asleep in the seat beside me before I even make it to the highway, and three hours pass in silence, save the steady, even cadence of her breath in sleep. And it hits me that despite our shared history, despite everything that we went through, everything we did together, I've never seen this girl sleep. The faint crease of worry hasn't entirely vanished from between her eyebrows, and her eyelids flicker with some unknowable dream, and her chest rises and falls peacefully beneath a navy blue sweater, and for the first time ever, she seems like a new person. And I realize in an instant, listening to the simple sound of her breathing: I love her even more than the old one.

Back in Forks, I order her into the shower while I attempt to make her something to eat with the meager supplies Charlie has in his kitchen; in the end, I settle for grilled cheese and a mug of coffee. When she slips into the chair across from me, damp-haired and doe-eyed, my heart lurches.

And gazing at her over Charlie's tiny kitchen table for two, it hits me that for the past six years, I've been trying to get back here. Not back to Forks, not even back to Bella, but just back to normal. Back to an even plane, back to the point where I feel whole, complete. Back to a place where I don't hate who I am, even if I'll always hate what I did.

I never could have hoped that finding my way back to Bella would lead me back to myself.

. . .

"_Bella's going to be there."_

_I freeze, spoon halting in its circular motion within the just-poured mug. "What?"_

"_Mom and Dad invited Charlie, and when he said Bella would be home for Thanksgiving, they sent her an invitation, too." Jasper's voice is cautious, and I wonder if Alice is in another room, phone pressed to her ear, issuing a similar warning. In my case, it fills me with anticipation. In hers, I wonder if it will be something more akin to dread. Or if, six years later, I'm nothing more than an unpleasant memory. "I thought I should give you a heads-up," my brother finishes, clearly uncertain as to what to do with my silence._

"_Yeah. Thanks." Jasper is the only one besides Emmett who knows what happened all those years ago; unlike Emmett, his information didn't come from Rosalie. That it was offered from Alice's perspective sometimes makes me wonder what my brother thinks of me._

_For hours, my brain is swirling around the simple idea that I'm going to be in the same room as Bella Swan; what I'll do when I get there is a mountain I feel ill-equipped to scale. _

_A six-year-old apology – stale or necessary?_

_Do I approach her like the lovestruck teenager who still can't believe his own stupidity, or a man who can look back on his mistake from a distance? I know which one is the truth; would she? Would she even care?_

_And what will she be like? Will she still be the girl I hurt, or a woman wearing a thicker skin? Which would I want, if the choice were even remotely mine?_

. . .


	50. Guard

**March 30, 2013 – Word prompt: Guard.**

**March 31, 2013 – Reflection day**

. . .

Charlie Swan's green sofa – which is actually only a loveseat – is lumpy and uncomfortable, and yet there's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be than here, my feet dangling over the arm, the house quiet around me. It occurs to me, as I shift on the rough upholstery, that Charlie's house is a home for two: a kitchen table with two chairs, a loveseat instead of a full-sized couch, a single bathroom. I wonder, faintly, when it was that he resigned himself to the fact that Renee was never coming back. I can't remember all those years ago, and if there was a bigger table or a bigger sofa or a bigger…anything. All I remember is Bella's tear-stained face at her bedroom window the night her mom left and didn't look back.

A noise from the doorway startles me and I lurch upward, peering over the back of the couch.

"That sofa always reminded me of you," she says, long hair a mess, long sleeves pulled down over her hands, long pale legs stretching out from beneath sleep shorts. I'm treated to flashes of our fumbling teenage explorations on this couch, and I can't stop the surprise from stealing over my face. When she notices and correctly infers where my mind went, she flushes, the stain of her cheeks visible even in the dim moonlight. "Not because of that." She picks at the hems of her sleeves. "The color. It…reminded me of your eyes."

If possible, this revelation hits my heart even harder than the memories of heated kisses, her hair fanned out over the very same couch cushion on which I'm currently sitting. I think about the deep, dark chocolate of her eyes, and the way I tried to find that same color in strangers' faces to no avail.

"Couldn't sleep?" I murmur finally, and she shakes her head.

"Kind of wired," she admits.

"Yeah."

Somehow, the silence crackles in a way it never has over the phone line, and I can almost see Bella's spine straighten, her shoulders tipping back, and in the pool of moonlight, this girl in her pajamas, I realize who she is. The girl I loved in a woman's body: the beautiful mind that pens poetry inside a head with a slightly narrower face; the heart that loved me and broke because of it behind that beautiful, maddeningly perfect woman's chest. And I realize, with a great, sweeping wave of relief, what's missing: the hunched posture, curled shoulders, downturned face of a girl who erected a guard wall to shut me out, to keep herself safe.

Before me stands the girl I loved, all grown up. The girl I broke, all put back together.

As if she's been watching my thoughts play out on my face, Bella holds out a hand. Wordlessly, I rise from the couch, my heart kicking up a cacophony in my chest when she threads her fingers through mine, and even with all I remember, I realize with this little gesture how much I'd forgotten. The simple surge of protectiveness that would rise in me every time she slipped her tiny palm against mine. The warmth of her skin. The delicate, bird-like bones of her fingers. The complete and utter perfection of it. Of her.

She leads me up the stairs, and the second one from the top still creaks.

She pauses only momentarily outside the door of her bedroom before leading me inside, and it's still a girly swirl of green and purple.

She doesn't hesitate before slipping beneath her comforter and holding out her hand, and even after everything, she's still Bella.

I slip in beside her, our bodies curling toward each other beneath a cocoon of blankets, and the darkness of the room around us is nothing compared with the bottomless dark of her searching eyes, which ping between mine. There's so much in them I remember: friendship, affection, something that almost looks like love. But mixed in there is something new: understanding. "Hi," she murmurs, her small fingers still knotted with mine.

"Hi," I whisper back, squeezing her hand gently.

She smiles, soft and indulgent, her dark eyes falling closed. I watch her for the space of a few breaths as the night settles around us, feeling as though her still-lingering smile tells me we're finally, blessedly, home.

And we sleep.

. . .

_Six years. This day has been six years in the making. You'd think I'd be better prepared. I try to picture seeing Bella after all this time, but there are too many scenarios hurtling through my mind for me to pin one down._

_Will she look different? Taller? Shorter hair? Heavier? Will she dress differently, act differently? Will her voice sound different? Will she still hate me?_

_I stand before my suitcase in my childhood bedroom, trying to breathe deep and even. Eyeball the pile of clothes I brought with me, feeling suddenly as though none of them are right; feel ridiculous because I did this very thing less than twenty-four hours earlier, standing before my closet, imagining seeing her again. _

_There's a part of me that wonders if it'll be anticlimactic, if I'll realize that I've built the memory of Bella up in my mind, that there's no way for the reality of the woman to compete with the memory of the girl. But then I remember the way my heart damn near froze in my chest when I saw her author photo inside the dust jacket of her book, and I know the truth._

_One more glance at the suitcase, its pile of sweaters._

_Settle on gray, because it was her favorite on me, once upon a time. The color of armor – fitting, in preparation for the metaphorical arrows she could fire at me._

_Slacks._

_A tiny bit of cologne, as a reminder to myself that she might not be that girl anymore, but I'm not that boy anymore, either._

_And a deep breath, for courage._

_I already lost her. I lost her years ago._

_Tonight is the night I start trying to find her again. Find me again. And maybe, some distant day, we can find us again._

. . .

**A/N: Here's where I blather. An enormous, heartfelt, from-the-toes-of-my-shoes thanks to HollettLA, whose cheerleading reached new heights with this one (even as she wanted to punch numerous characters in their baby-making parts at various points in the story). You're sublime, lady; I'm so glad to have your friendship. xo**

**And deepest thanks to you all for reading and for your thoughtful feedback.**

**Stay awesome. xo**


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